


Trouble comes along

by whalesandwitchcraft



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Modern AU, Recreational Drug Use, slow ish burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-23 10:22:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 33,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8324158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whalesandwitchcraft/pseuds/whalesandwitchcraft
Summary: Corvo Attano is an ex-con taking care of his feisty 10-year-old kid and working as a bouncer at the Hound Pits Club. His life isn't a great one, not compared to how things were when his career-criminal girlfriend Jessamine was still alive, but he's doing okay. Okay, that is, until Daud darkens his doorway and makes everything a million times worse.





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's the modern AU ayyyy

“It’s an issue. I know you’re doing your best, Corvo, but the dean said that another fight will get Emily expelled and that’s unacceptable.”

  
Corvo shifted his phone from one hand to the other, then to his shoulder as he dug through the back of the closet. Dress shirts. He was certain he owned dress shirts.

  
“You and I both know that she is too smart for alternative school, and if I’m honest, I think your daughter’s behavior will only get worse if she’s placed in a position where she can rule like a little empress over other problem students.”

  
He’d worn dress shirts before, he knew this, in his old life. His old life. It felt --- not as though the man he was six months ago stood on the other side of a foggy mirror but more like the mirror was cracked, his reflection unrecognizable even to himself. No matter how hard he searched for whatever sense of justice and simple self-confidence that man had possessed, he always came up empty.  
“This is a key moment for you to step in and make sure that she keeps her mouth shut and her fists by her sides for the rest of the year. There are only two months left- this is an achievable goal, Corvo.”

  
He’d worn a dress shirt at his trial. The surreal feeling of all those eyes on him, the stiffness of the collar, the scent of its unfamiliar starch, Emily standing to the side with red worried eyes, the frigid Dunwall High Court AC his best excuse for the nearly-uncontrollable shivers that wracked his body, the way the judge said her name, her name, her-  
“Corvo are you listening to me?” Callista sounded worried. She always sounded worried, and Corvo didn’t know if he could claim all of the blame on that front but it sure seemed likely. 

“Miss Curnow, I’ll do my best. I’ll talk to her.” He finally dug out a dress shirt that looked stain-free and shrugged it on, feeling alien and nervous.

Callista sighed and let him go after wheedling a promise from him to check in with the school on Monday and see if Corvo could smooth things over. He didn’t think that was the best plan- gods knew he looked nothing like a respectable father- but he felt certain she had some form to fill out and the more Dad Things he did the better it would go for her.

He finished with the last button, fiddling briefly with the collar and trying to remember what it was like when he was ten. He got into fights, sure, but it didn’t seem as big of a deal back then. Was it because Emily was a girl? Was it because Karnaca’s schools weren’t legislated like Dunwall’s? Was it just easier back then, the rules and expectations for children more lax?

“Sweetie, come tell me if I look okay,” Corvo called through the half-open door to his bedroom. He listened as feet pounded noisily through the house, and then Emily burst in, a giddy ball of energy.

“I can’t believe you’re actually gonna do it!”

“We had an arrangement, Miss Kaldwin,” he raised his eyebrows in mock seriousness. “I go on dates with creeps from the internet, and you stop fighting at school.”

“A true hardship for both of us,” And it was hard to tell if Emily was being sarcastic or serious but for a sparkle in her eyes. When had she got so clever? Corvo reached out and mussed her hair, a sudden wave of fondness and sorrow washing quickly over him. Christ, he was too old for this shit.

Emily eyed him critically, and he hoped suddenly that she had outgrown her penchant for tiaras and pink feather boas. He’d be the creep from the internet if she demanded he add anything from her collection to his getup.

“You look like-” her voice broke so suddenly and thoroughly that Corvo found his heart racing as though someone was going to hurt her and only he could stop the threat. “-like you did when they sent you to prison,” She finished in a whisper. Mouth dry, Corvo unbuttoned the shirt and flung it. He forced a smile onto suddenly stone lips.

“Less formal, then. Show off the gun show?”

“Grossssss!” Emily wailed, scrunching up her nose and pushing him away. Corvo let himself be pushed out of the room, through the hall, and out the door with barely enough time to wave to Samuel and grab his coat.

“Have fun!” Emily called brightly. “I hope she’s really cool!”

 

 

It was a dark street. A dark street and not a dark street in the nicest neighborhood. There was already trash on the ground. It was not the nicest neighborhood so no one was apt to look around too much or too long because, well. That was how you ended up dead. And it would be your own fault. It was a dark alley on the wrong side of the tracks and there were about a hundred reasons why it took an entire day for someone to notice that there in the middle of the sidewalk, glittery with hoarfrost, was a severed human hand. Just the hand. Just the left hand. Lopped off neatly at the wrist and no other signs of a struggle. A tattooed hand, but again, bad neighborhood. Gangs. Violence. A hand tattoo was not unexpected.

Geoff Curnow groaned and scrubbed a gloved hand over stubble that grew entirely too fast for his taste. A severed hand in a troubled area and 24 hours of lead time lost because no one had even noticed the thing, bloody spray and all, sitting flush center on the voids-damned sidewalk.

Geoff Curnow wasn’t a drinking man, but days like this he thought that maybe he could be. He got out his notepad, pushed the sense of futility from his mind, and started cataloging details.

 

 

“So what is it that you do,” Esma Boyle purred, eyes flitting purposefully over Corvo’s body. He kept his sigh more subtle than her once-over, which wasn’t much of a challenge. This was not going well.

“I’m a bouncer at a nightclub. The Hound Pits?”

“I’ve heard of it. A bouncer,” The glee in her voice made Corvo want to shrivel up in his upholstered seat. He could practically hear her scratching another notch in her bedpost. And it wasn’t the worst idea, really, whispered six months of aching loneliness and half a bottle of expensive Tyvian red. He could let the rich lady take him home, he reasoned, not like it was a big deal- certainly to her it wasn’t so what was the harm?

Six months was an awfully long time to wait before jumping into situations designed to hurt, Corvo reasoned, this couldn’t possibly count as self-sabotage, he was overthinking it, maybe he was afraid? If that was the case then he had better get this one night stand on the road because he didn’t like living with fear, with the unknown, feeling helpless was the worst thing he could think of for himself and he had been trapped six months, a lifetime, especially when you’re ten, and let’s not think about all the time the watch wasted because they thought they had caught their murderer and he was rotting in a Coldridge cell, and-

“Corvo?” Esma leaned in, fox eyes suddenly concerned.

No. Corvo couldn’t do this. Maybe- maybe if she hadn’t actually cared. Maybe if she had been an absolute monster, he could. He sighed, realizing that he hadn’t drawn breath in a stupid amount of time. Time to extricate himself, and not be mean about it. Esma Boyle didn’t deserve that.

 

 

The second hand was in a coffeeshop. A nice coffeeshop, in downtown Dunwall near the theatre district. The hand had carefully manicured nails, was severed precisely at the wrist, and bore the exact same tattoo style as the first hand. The actual marks were different. There were more of them and they felt somehow wilder to Geoff. The barista who opened the shop had called the watch station in hysterics, and even now hiccupped out the occasional sob as Geoff listened to her story. She didn’t recognize the hand, but she had found it in the center of the bare wooden floor when she unlocked the shop at 5:00 AM that morning. The lead time was less, not that it mattered. Geoff still had nothing to go on. The tattoos were like nothing he had ever seen before. Nothing he had ever seen before and there seemed no obvious connection between this hand and the previous one.

And if there was going to be a third then Geoff felt certain detectives from the Tower would be called in and his chance to solve this maddening puzzle would be gone forever. He flipped to a new page of his notebook and tried very hard to notice every little thing he could about the coffeeshop, the hand, and the weepy barista in front of him.

 

 

Emily hovered in the doorway for a second too long, and Corvo immediately inspected her knuckles, her elbows, expecting to find signs of a fight and an impending call from the school or, worse, from Callista.

But Emily just seemed hesitant.

“The thing is, Corvo, I really want to punch this one kid. He’s mean. Not to me, but there’s this boy with a lisp and he picks on him all the time. It’s not fair.”

Corvo tucked a bookmark into his book and held out his hand for Emily’s phone. This had, horrifyingly enough, become a routine. It would start when Emily watched a rom-com. The little terror was incredibly good at ‘just finding’ them on the computer, and Corvo didn’t want to admit that he had no idea how she was pirating them. But he was certain she was. So she’d watch one of these (he deleted the ones rated R and patted himself on the back for good Dad Things but he didn’t dare tell Callista about any of it) and then she’d get thoughtful. He could almost time it- she’d think about it for a day or so, and then tell him about some jerk child she would go fight, unless Corvo felt like making the same deal he made last time?

He cursed himself for ever agreeing to go out with Esma Boyle (in his defense she was really, really attractive) in the first place. One deal turned into three, turned into low-level harassment from a ten-year-old.

He scrolled down the page, reading quickly.

“I don’t know, Emily, you know how I feel about the city watch. And 54 is a little old.”

She visibly relaxed.

“You were nervous because this is a man,” Corvo said flatly.

“Corvo-”

He wanted to nip this in the bud. She didn’t deserve to grow up with any of the hangups that he did. (Though now that he thought about it, it was probably too late for most of them. Still. He had to try.)

“You know one of my favorite things about you, sweetie?”

She shook her head.

“You’re incredibly observant. You put things together that most other people would never connect. I love that about you, Em.”

She finally stopped hovering and perched on the arm of Corvo’s chair.

“And you’re right, sweetie, I _would_ be nervous going out on a date with a man. It’s...not something I’m used to, and Dunwall is a city where it could get me killed, and you know that.”

“But that’s wrong!” Emily blurted, in the same tone she called out the bully she wanted to fight. In that moment Corvo was so unbelievably proud of his daughter that he thought his heart might burst.

He focused on that, and not the that, yes, as plain as he had put it, he could get killed. Followed home by thugs. Questioned ‘too well’ by the watch. blacklisted from any job he ever wanted. Denied services at the Abbey. Emily shunned. It was too much, he-  
“You’re damned right it’s wrong. It’s completely unjust, and there are a number of ways we could change it. Ideas?”

Emily frowned. “We could kill all the people who would kill you. We could kill them first.”

Corvo suppressed a laugh.

“Or we could show them that I am nothing to hate: nothing to be afraid of.” Corvo appraised the dating profile in front of him. The man had laughter wrinkles and had been out of the closet with his family since he was 18. Someone completely different from him in every way. An officer of the watch, a native of Dunwall, devout, and...proud of who he was.

“They should be afraid of you,” Emily whispered.

Corvo pretended not to hear and held out his hand. “Don’t beat up that bully, and I’ll go out with this man.”

They shook hands.

 

 

Corvo walked quickly, settling his thoughts into the nothingness of his moving feet against the pavement. It was a practiced nothingness, something that he had needed since his days in the Serkonan Royal Guard, since his days of running into certain danger, since his time spent as a bodyguard, since his time spent protecting her. Jessamine. There always came a point where fear was useless, and the best thing to do was to move decisively and be in his body instead of his mind.

It was a date, he chided, not fucking combat.

But he continued to move quickly, and he almost missed the severed hand lying there in the middle of the street.

Corvo’s jaw dropped. He stared at it stupidly for a second, then pulled out his phone to call the watch. Some small secret part of him was grateful to miss his chance to publicly go on a date with a man, but mostly he was transfixed by the limb oozing blood with its lifeless palm turned up to the full moon above.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Find me on tumblr at whales-and-witchcraft!


	2. Chapter 2

Four AM was a subtle hour. It crept up, identical to its twin three AM in every way but for a very slight pressure behind his eyeballs. Corvo Attano reeked of banana daiquiri (spilled on him at an unfortunately early hour of his shift), had managed to bloody a knuckle breaking up a fight, and had deflected no less than five young women with questing hands and the thin guise of drunkenness to excuse their behavior. He was _so_ done with this day. He had ditched his city watch date in favor of talking with some guy from the city watch about the hand, amusingly enough.

And now it was four AM and he was stowing the last drunk into a waiting cab, pretending he couldn’t smell the fake fruit and sparkly rum on his t-shirt, and hoping that Havelock wouldn’t have any extra tasks for him before he fled the nightclub.

Corvo stood up from the cab just as a very nice _very_ new steamcar rolled up to the Hound Pits. A tall dark figure, nose and mouth hidden behind a plain black handkerchief, emerged from the car. Her eyes ran quickly over Corvo, the cab, and the darkened doorway.

“Fetch Havelock.”

Corvo bristled at the command, but it was late and he just wanted to go home.

When Corvo brought his boss out front, there were two more bandit-bandana’ed thugs standing there and between them a man in a black suit sharp enough to cut glass, red silk tie gashing down a broad chest, and eyes like -ugh- diamonds. Corvo crossed his arms and noted the white scar trailing down the man’s face, the black leather driving gloves he wore even while being chauffeured, the obscenely stylish Serkonan leather shoes, and the slight drape of his suit jacket where a weapon was almost well-concealed,

“Havelock, your muscle is trying to kill me with his eyes. Make him stop,” Said the man in the suit.

Havelock whacked Corvo in the shoulder and he reluctantly fixed his eyes on the ground.

“Can I give you a tour of the place?” Havelock asked, gesturing broadly at the converted warehouse that had somehow wound up cool enough for loaded twenty-somethings and an assortment of noble socialites to line up around the block in anticipation of drinking, dancing, and if Corvo was _very_ lucky, not vomiting anywhere near his shoes.

Suit’s eyes slashed holes in the wooden crossbeams, the thick layers of faded posters and rusty staples texturing the walls, the wolfhound done in neons above the door, the ratty edges of the stool Corvo sometimes got to sit on while IDing well-dressed noble brats through the door.

“By all means.”

Corvo trailed reluctantly behind, watching the bandit-thugs sweep the perimeter in a way that looked disturbingly military. Suit gave the bar a cursory glance, then frowned at Cecelia cleaning glasses behind the bar.

“There will be uniform changes. Skin sells, or so I hear.”

Corvo growled and stepped towards the suit. Cecelia looked up, worried.

The man in the suit raised an eyebrow. “Muscle, you smell like a 19-year-old sorority girl about five seconds from lying and telling her hookup it’s her first time trying anal.”

Corvo took a deep breath and counted to five. “Cecelia over there makes a mean banana daiquiri, Suit. We don’t have a reputation for under-serving here and sometimes-”

“-I didn’t ask for your life story, Muscle. And ‘Suit?’ Show some _respect_.”

The thugs in the corner, especially the one who had ordered Corvo around earlier, were now paying entirely too much attention. It made him nervous, and when he was nervous he-

“Listen asshole, I don’t know who you are or why you’re looking at the Hound Pits like it’s the prize bloodox you’re gonna take to the spring formal, but you don’t know the first thing about nightclubs. If you think-”

Havelock pushed him back. “Corvo, Daud bought the club. I, ah, took out a loan I couldn’t repay so we decided that I would….retire early. It’s a win-win!”

“Congratulations,” Corvo growled.

Havelock headed for the door at a brisk pace, pulling on his coat. “I’ll leave you to it.”

Unbelievable.

As the door closed behind Havelock, Corvo stepped in until he was toe to toe with the suit and hissed, “Listen, _Daud_ , I don’t know if The Outsider has your balls in a jar or what, but all I see is a bully who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.”

Oh no. Suit smelled good. Suit smelled like rich tobacco, fine leather, aged cognac. After a night of smelling like bad decisions at a Karnaca beach resort there was a small piece of Corvo that wanted to just stand there and breathe the man in. He was suddenly even more furious than he had been at the idea of forcing Cecelia to dress in anything she’d find uncomfortable.

The suit -Daud- met his gaze unflinching.

“Muscle, I _would_ be surprised that you don’t know who I am, but you clearly didn’t get hired for your brains. So here’s what’s going to happen-”

Daud closed two or three inches more of the personal space Corvo had invaded. It took every ounce of willpower Corvo had not to step back.

“-I am going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.” He said it like it was supposed to mean something, but it didn’t, and frankly it was four AM and Corvo was sick of this well-dressed fuck and his maddeningly nice smell.

“Good luck, you weird loan shark. The only thing I want from you is for you to go fuck yourself.”

Daud stared at him, mouth slightly agape. “No, I, Muscle, that’s - come on, Marlon Brando? The racing wolfhound’s head, with all the blood? What part of ‘make you an offer you can’t refuse’ do you not get?”

Corvo was completely lost, but he didn’t care. Time to double down. Insulting the prick in the suit was actually doing wonders for his mood. “What part of ‘go find a dildo and jump on it until your nose bleeds’ did _you_ not get?”

Things happened very quickly after that. Corvo noticed Cecelia shaking her head at him from behind the bar. The next thing he noticed was the side of a pistol flashing up at his face. Next, a sharp crack, white hot pain where his jaw was supposed to be, and he was suddenly sitting on the ground. A thug stood over him, and Daud wasn’t even trying to hide the smirk on his face.

“You’re fired.”


	3. Chapter 3

YOU CANNOT SAVE HER  
YOU CANNOT SAVE HER  
YOU CANNOT SAVE HER  
YOU CANNOT SAVE HER  
YOU CANNOT SAVE HER  
YOU CANNOT SAVE HER  
YOU CANNOT SAVE HER

Corvo stared at his phone. An unknown number. Shivering in the predawn chill, jaw aching, he tucked the phone away and began walking again. This was _definitely_ what he needed after a long shift and accidentally insulting the head of the voids-damned Whalers.

 

Sweat trickled slowly down past his upper lip, salt as he breathed in, deep and steady, the heavy barbell moving smoothly through the air. Six AM. The sunrise, watery and dim like all Dunwall’s sunrises, had found him in the gym, moving fluidly and methodically through lifts that took all of his focus.

He put the barbell down, muscles shaking with the effort.

 

_“Come on you big baby,” Jessamine laughed, tugging on his hand. Corvo pushed his lower lip out petulantly, only for Jess to reach out and grab it._

_“What if I wait out here?” He mumbled, her fingers tugging his lower lip around, trying not to giggle._

_She shook her head. “I am not carrying all those tools by myself. You promised you’d help me with this one!”_

_Corvo sighed, knelt, and held out his hand. Jessamine vaulted from his hand up the wall and in one sinuous motion she pulled herself into the mansion’s open window. He watched her slender form with admiration. Jessamine Kaldwin was a thing of beauty when she was on a job. The danger put a sparkle in her eye, lightened her steps, made her every action intentional and acrobatic. Never mind that this -breaking into the homes of the rich and powerful to steal expensive baubles and ancient artifacts- was the antithesis of everything he stood for, everything he was by day. He’d throw it all away in a heartbeat for just the slightest chance to stand by her side._

 

He picked the barbell back up, muscles screaming for him to stop.

 

_“Corvo, I’m pregnant,” Her hands were fluttering sinewy things picking apart the hem of her shirt._

_He knew he should say something, but his tongue was heavy and he found himself looking vacantly across the park, attention snapping back to her pale face when he realized he had been staring at a group of small children playing by the pond._

_“I love you more than I love anything on this planet, Jess. I’ll be by your side no matter what,” He whispered, taking one cold hand into his own. He had so many questions. How long had she known? How had it happened- they had been careful! Why now? He pushed them away. It really didn’t matter. This was a crossroads and he could feel his world tipping, outside his control. He was afraid to even imagine what he wanted her to say, because he was worried that he’d be crushed if she didn’t want the same, that one stray thought could drive a wedge between them forever._

_Jessamine’s smile was a breeze on a spring day. It was that last inch of hot chocolate in the mug. It was brand new books with entire worlds hidden inside. Corvo felt himself melting, hope and excitement swelling in his chest and fear lancing through it all._

_“This changes everything,” He cried, picking her up and spinning her around until they were both dizzy and laughing and breathless._

 

A callus on one hand broke, and Corvo swore reflexively as the skin tore away. He put the barbell down. He was made of jelly, and his stomach had gone full circle from tearing itself apart to numb detachment. He sighed and walked on wobbly legs to the locker room.

 

YOU CANNOT SAVE HER  
YOU CANNOT SAVE HER  
YOU CANNOT SAVE HER  
YOU CANNOT SAVE HER  
YOU CANNOT SAVE HER  
YOU CANNOT SAVE HER  
YOU CANNOT SAVE HER

With a sob Corvo flung his phone against the wall, then finished breaking the skin on the rest of his knuckles by punching the locker nearest him.

Mind blank, he laced on running shoes and with the last ounce of self preservation he possessed he put the phone in his pocket before heading out the door to start jogging down the cold and empty Dunwall streets.

His body ached as the kilometers piled up and the sun rose, muscles protesting at every step. Slowing to a walk by the river, he looked over the ships, whaling and shipping and pleasure alike, bobbing gently in the icy black. Corvo felt his legs give out a split second before they actually did, but there was nothing left in him to stop it.

The world went dark.

His mouth filled with blood and a thrumming violet light flickered over the dark living room. Emily must have left one of her movies going. There on the computer screen was a figure in a black hoodie, static buzzing around him. Corvo set down the Hound Pits table he’d been carrying and walked the suddenly immense distance to the screen. Water trickling, a far off voice whispering in strange dischord, since when had Emily started watching horror movies? The figure’s eyes were black, glossy like oil, and he had something of drowning around his pale edges.

“Hello, Corvo,” Said the figure on the screen in a voice sonorous and serene. “You’re in a terrible state, aren’t you? An ex-con fired from his dead-end job, his daughter one false move away from the foster care system, and months have gone by but your wounds are still just as fresh as they were the day Jessamine was killed.” Though the figure wasn’t smiling Corvo felt certain he was being mocked.

“Trouble comes along,” Corvo rasped, hands in fists. He knew the stories, children’s stories to tell at night with a flashlight tucked under your chin, of the black-eyed bastard and his gifts and the heretical marks his disciples tattooed on their own hands.

The young man on the screen smiled then, and it was unpleasant. Something of a snake there, something cold and old and calculating.

“Do you know who Faust is, Corvo?”

He nodded, no longer trusting his voice.

The figure paused, one eyebrow raised. “Wait, you’ve never seen The Godfather but you’re familiar with Faust?”

Corvo’s mind raced. The prick in the suit with his driving gloves. “Daud has your gifts.”

The Outsider clapped his hands together. “So there _is_ a brain in there! That’s a relief. This is gonna be like a reverse Faust, okay?”

Corvo spat the blood from his mouth -how had he forgotten it was there?- and realized that The Outsider had grabbed Corvo’s phone and in his hands the newly-shattered screen started knitting itself back together.

“I need something. And you can get it for me. You’re special, Corvo. you have so much wasted potential it’s staggering. It’s time to change that. It’s time to stop hiding. Which definitely sounds like I’m a life coach,” He smiled thinly, “I am not.”  
“What do you need?” Corvo watched the figure on screen tap out commands on his phone. The Outsider looked up and smiled, suddenly looking human and happy in the purple glow.

“No argument? You really are at the end of your rope, aren’t you?”

“About to hang,” Corvo agreed.

“Oh, I _like_ you. This is going _way_ better than I thought it would. You goodie-goodie types are usually just terrible to mark. Looks like you have a bad streak somewhere in all that lily white, Corvo.”

“She’s dead now,” He said softly.

“Which brings us back nicely to what I need from you! The last thing Jessamine Kaldwin stole before she died was an ancient artifact called The Holger Device. I need it back in the Academy of Natural Philosophy as soon as possible.”

“Jessamine? Is this connected with her murder? Can I find out who killed her?”

The Outsider ignored him, static briefly obscuring his features when he next spoke. “You have thirteen days to do this. I grant you my powers, my gifts, my dark arts, but if you fail in this task I will take your tongue.”

Corvo had a sense that he had asked all the wrong questions.

The figure on the screen held out his hand. “Do we have a deal?”

 

 

Geoff Curnow decided that he wasn’t a city watch officer. Not even close. No, a better job title would be ‘finder of things on the ground that should not be on the ground’ and he had just found another.

“Mr. Attano?”

Lying in a crumpled heap, the man looked vastly different from when Geoff had met him over a severed hand two days ago. Those remarkably full lips were relaxed, almost falling open, and without the man’s dark eyes peering out from under stormy eyebrows Geoff felt like he was allowed to stare. Attano’s hair spilled from its ponytail over his forehead. Salt encrusted his skin- he must have been out for a morning jog.

There was no justice in the universe. This was a fact that Dunwall’s hard pavement had beat into his head the moment he donned the uniform, but at this moment he knew it in his bones. It wasn’t fair that Attano was all solid planes and trim curves, wide shoulders and lean muscle, and it wasn’t fair that his black t-shirt rode up just enough for a peek at chiseled abs and a thick happy trail that suddenly held all of Geoff’s attention.

There was no justice in Dunwall, and no justice for Geoff Curnow. He averted his eyes, dead-ended the train of thought that mainly involved licking the salt off all that warm skin, cleared his throat, and radioed for an ambulance cart to come by.

He shook Attano’s shoulder and the man finally stirred. Ice prickled at Geoff’s spine as Mr. Attano reached a hand up to push hair out of his eyes. On the back of Attano’s hand was faint bruising, muddy green against olive skin, in distinctly tattoo-like marks.

Marks he had seen three times before.


	4. Chapter 4

Officer Thorpe eyed the stack of bills Billie set on his desk. He made an approving grunt, but made no move to count them.

Billie supposed she should be flattered that Daud trusted her to take the Watch their weekly bribe. She was ladder-climbing. Like the mob was some fucking career path, and Billie was marching step by painstaking step towards the top. It wasn’t a bad thing, no, but she had been doing this for years now and this seemed about as high through the ranks as she could go.

Out of force of habit Billie flicked a tendril of her mind through Thorpe’s personal phone, then his work computer. He was still attempting to cheat on his wife but was making piss-poor progress. Billie decided she’d assign a junior to make sure he succeeded, and that the Whalers found out about it. No such thing as too much leverage.

There was something...more interesting on his work computer.

“I saw a new face, the other day, when I was passing by,” Billie said, deliberately casual.

“Oh?” Thorpe stuffed his bribe money into a pocket.

“A detective, I think.”

“Must’ve been Detective Morris Sullivan. There’s an odd thing-- hotshot from Dunwall Tower shows up on important business but they won’t tell the rest of us what’s going on.”

“Bureaucracy, right?” Billie smiled, insides screaming. Morris Sullivan. And they hadn’t known!? Outsider’s balls.

“See you next week,” Thorpe called as she left the office.

 

Corvo Attano sat on his couch nursing a beer, staring vacantly at the television while Emily played with his phone next to him. There were strange bruises on his left hand that got a little bit darker as the hours passed. Or maybe that was just his imagination. He had punched the gym lockers with his right hand, he was sure of it, and even if he hadn’t it wouldn’t explain the strange concentric licks of the bruises.

He gripped his beer slightly too hard, and he couldn’t concentrate on the show they were watching at all. Something about teenage werewolves, only there were no werewolves to be seen, just bad CGI teeth and silly makeup jobs.

When the city watch (same guy as last time, what was his name? George? Geoff?) had decided that Corvo was alright, he had been driven home and he had collapsed into bed for most of the next day. He had been woken by his alarm to go to work -he hadn’t thought to remove that alarm and the thought of no more work to go to was suddenly weighty and painful- and that was when things got weird.

He had turned off the alarm with his mind. Which was impossible. He must have dreamed it, or maybe he _had_ suffered a concussion from the fall.

His phone’s screen was pristine, even though he had hurled it against a locker and smashed the screen beyond recognition. And he had turned off the alarm with his mind.

“Corvo, what’s this one?” Emily waved his phone at him.

Corvo squinted. The Heart App? That was new. He tapped the little icon, some teensy pulsing clockwork heart, and suddenly his phone trembled in his hand. The screen went dark, then glowed warm when he pointed it towards Emily. He heard murmuring, like a crowd muffled by furniture in another room. He tapped the screen.

_She sees more than she is telling. Young Lady Emily._

The voice was horribly familiar and as if the phone was on fire Corvo let it go and it clattered on the ground. Emily picked it up, frowning.

“Why’d you do that?”

“You didn’t hear anything?”

Emily shook her head and handed the phone back to Corvo.

It started trembling immediately, like a small startled animal, and as he swung it around the room it began whispering. He felt it in his bones, in his teeth, and he was walking into the garage before he even knew what he was doing, hands shaking with an eagerness he didn’t understand.

Inside Samuel’s toolbox was a small carved bit of bone. It had a symbol on one side and the phone screeched like the dead as he picked it up. It felt like coming home, holding the tiny thing in his palm, it felt like something slotted into place inside him, like some emptiness he didn’t know he had was suddenly soothed.

The phone quieted.

Without really thinking about it, Corvo strung the thing along his hair tie. He needed it close to him.

He stepped back inside the house and Emily looked up at him, concerned. Behind her on the screen, a backlit teenager opened his mouth and fangs grew, then the screen cut to another teenager whose eyes opened wide with shock at seeing the monster his trusted friend had now become.

Corvo nodded to the kid on the screen. What was happening to him?

 

Billie turned a specific corner and closed her eyes for the fraction of a second it took to move from _here_ to _there_. Thomas, insouciant nerd that he was, had started calling them spawn points and soon the whole group had adopted the term.

Spawn points were bundles of bone and barbed wire, teeth and frayed cloth, scrawled runes in blackest ink. They were tucked inside old electrical boxes or hidden in rats’ nests on telephone wires, and when Billie approached one it burbled and clucked at her until she held another place in her mind and-

-And she was in Draper’s Ward listening to shopkeepers clack down the metal latticework covering their doors, the air swimming with rush hour traffic noise and radio chatter. Orange sunlight lit her path. Green fluorescent light spilled onto the sidewalk as she pushed her way into a tiny shop. Bells jingled at the door.

Flowers everywhere, and not in a cute romantic way, bright and cheery and carefully bundled up for your purchasing pleasure. This was a tiny jungle. Fecund vegetation, a depth of green that could not have possibly fit into the tiny space. Imported Pandyssian orchids eyed her darkly from a corner. A stranglevine wove over support beams, disappearing with intention into the AC duct above. Glowing blue daisies bobbed their tiny heads cheerfully as she stepped farther in, and she was half convinced the carpet under her boots was actually moss.

“Can I help you?” A voice called from the back.

Billie was transfixed by the heavy smell of pollen, of green, of mulch and growth and mystery, transfixed by the impossibility of all these plants growing in the middle of a commercial zone, transfixed until a woman in white stood in front of her with perfectly arched eyebrows, quirked violet lips, and dark eyeshadow that made the brilliance of her blue eyes pop like daggers launched straight into Billie’s heart.

“I don’t usually see your kind here,” The woman said softly, settling onto a stool behind the shop counter. It was a good opening move: she knew who Billie was and she knew that BIllie knew who she was as well. Her eyes made a blatant study of Billie’s bandana, crisp suit, heavy combat boots.

Billie tore her eyes away and leaned onto the counter, focusing on using physical space to make herself seem more imposing and less starstruck.

“I was told to get flowers for a funeral. Three caskets.”

“My condolences.”

“Daud said to get them from anywhere but here-” Billie watched for some reaction to the name and sure enough there was the tiniest glimmer of something in that milky face. Anger? Chagrin? Venom?

“-So here I am.”

“Oh, I like you already.”

Billie had fully expected a chill reception. She was completely unprepared for the way the woman smiled, the way her entire face lit up and her lips quirked up unevenly, the way her voice seemed genuinely fond in an instant.

“You’re something different.”

And Billie blushed, like some fucking high schooler, suddenly grateful that the Whaler mask hid at least part of her face.

“I’ll cut you a deal,” The woman continued in completely businesslike tones. “I’ll _give_ you flowers for a funeral as grand as your kind need, in exchange for dinner with me later tonight.”

“No deal,” Billie’s tone was equally dry.

“Oh?” The woman blinked.

“I don’t go out with anyone whose name I don’t know.”

And there was that smile again, all-consuming, generous, delighted.

The woman held a slender hand out. “Delilah Copperspoon.”

Billie shook, the leather of her glove registering the warmth of Delilah’s hand. “Billie Lurk.”

“A pleasure,” Delilah beamed, and Billie could have sworn that every flower in the shop unfurled a little farther as she did.

 

The gun range was dry, dusty, a slash of heavy rock below a clear blue sky. After days of holing up inside with a mountain of tedious job applications the crisp fall air felt wonderful. Corvo got out of his truck at about the same time a flashy, arrogantly modern steamcar rolled up.

This time around, Emily had hardly needed to try to convince Corvo to date another internet creep. Incredible as his daughter was, she was still a ten-year-old and Corvo was getting desperate for grown-up conversation. He’d spent days alternately applying for jobs and searching for this Holger Device, and he was getting nowhere with either.

Long-legged and practically bouncing with energy, the gaudy steamcar’s driver hopped out, made a rapid series of hand signs to a handful of people already at the range, then waved at Corvo. His heart sank. Gang signs. He’d learned a few current ones in prison, but had made a study of them as part of his exams at the military academy back in Serkonos.

“Corvo, right? The name’s Slackjaw.”

Slackjaw had thick ginger muttonchops, a toothy white grin, a pleasantly deep voice with an accent Corvo couldn’t place, and was wearing a fucking bow tie to a shooting range.

How did Emily _find_ these people?

“Nice to meet you,” Corvo said.

They set up next to some Abbey of the Everyman recruits, and Corvo could tell that Slackjaw was disappointed for a second that Corvo didn’t need to be taught how to shoot.

Despite his initial irritation at Slackjaw’s happy-go-lucky demeanor, inappropriate attire, and the ridiculous way he referred to himself in the third person, Corvo had to admit he was having fun shooting with the man. Relaxing a little, even, for the first time since that disastrous final night at The Hound Pits Club. Slackjaw told him some improbable but highly entertaining stories about recent run-ins with the city watch. Corvo shared a few choice encounters with drunk nobles at the Hound Pits, and he found Slackjaw’s deep belly laugh extremely flattering. He had forgotten how much he loved the sharp smell of gunsmoke, the meditative state he slipped into while emptying rounds into a target, the comfortable silence between two experienced shooters.

Corvo leaned against their lane’s wooden rail, hardly aware of the smile on his face. Slackjaw sauntered over, theatrically twirling the ridiculous engraved revolver he had been shooting.

“This been a grand ole time,” Slackjaw said with satisfaction, tugging open the gun’s case and taking out cleaning equipment. The Abbey Overseer in the next lane was staring at the two of them, but Corvo ignored it. He was having too good a time to let it be ruined by some religious nutjob. They hadn’t even touched- the Abbey had nothing on either of them.

He watched Slackjaw grip the pistol, push the empty cylinder out with a practiced thumb, then spread oil over the exposed frame with deft, slick flingers. Corvo suddenly felt slightly too warm. He made a point of not looking into the next lane.

“Slackjaw was thinkin’ maybe we grab a pint after this? I know a place does a sour mash that’ll put a sparkle in your eye. Not that you need that, Corvo, sharp shooter like you,” Slackjaw winked as he rubbed oil up and down the barrel of the gun, long smooth strokes with a completely unnecessary twist at the barrel’s tip. Corvo felt a blush creep over his face. Was Slackjaw doing it on purpose? Or did Corvo just really _really_ need to get laid?

“That sounds nice,” He hesitated for a moment, then continued, “Let me just text the babysitter and let him know.”

“Got a kid, huh? You’ll have to thank him for letting Slackjaw steal his pa away for a drink.”

Corvo let out the breath he had been holding. “I’ll thank her for you, yeah.”

Slackjaw moved on to the revolver’s cylinder, putting gentle pressure on the ejector rod to get it to stand erect from its casing, swiping over it quickly, then used the pad of his finger to rub little lubed-up circles around each chamber’s opening. This was complete overkill for cleaning a gun that was clearly kept in peak condition, but Corvo was hypnotized by the smooth, repetitive motions of Slackjaw’s hands and slightly flustered and flushed when Slackjaw finally decided he was done cleaning the piece.

They walked back to the fenced-off gravel parking lot. Slackjaw deliberately followed Corvo to his truck, then crowded him in close to it, completely out of sight from the rest of the range.

Corvo had to do this before he lost his nerve.

Corvo pushed his hand flat against Slackjaw’s chest. The marks on the back of his hand prickled with violent interest.

“I need to know something,” He said, boring into Slackjaw’s eyes with his own. “I saw the hand signals, your thugs, you told me about your lawbreaking, so please, don’t lie to me.”

Slackjaw stilled.

“Who are you with?”

“Bottle Street Boys. Slackjaw run the joint, Slackjaw made the joint,” He stuck his chin out with pride and Corvo dropped his hand. Slackjaw didn’t move away, but he did tilt his head to the side.

Corvo stifled an internal scream. Ostensibly the Bottle Street Boys were one of the more respectable tumors crowding Dunwall’s underworld, mainly into bootlegging and cards, but they still claimed responsibility for a unhealthy number of bodies tossed into the Wrenhaven. A guy on Corvo’s cellblock in Coldridge had Bottle Street membership, and he had been a particularly miserable motherfucker.

He scrubbed both hands over his face and tried to think of the best way to explain himself. “Look, Slackjaw. I _really_ like you. But my ex was a lawbreaker and it got her killed. I really can’t handle another one, and I can’t do it to my daughter. I’m sorry.”

Slackjaw nodded, and then before Corvo could react he closed the distance between them and pressed his lips to Corvo’s. His whiskers scratched, his lips were soft, and then he moved back.

“If you’re one step away from the life, you might want to think on what’s holding you back. It ain’t so bad over here,” Slackjaw smiled, “The water’s fine. Better, even. So if you ever change your mind, you give Slackjaw a call.”

And with that he gave a surprisingly jaunty bow for a man with such long limbs, then walked away.


	5. Chapter 5

The sun set as Corvo drove away from the gun range back towards the heart of Dunwall and he thought it was maddeningly fitting for his dying spirits. 

The car came out of nowhere, no lights, no warning, just the sudden slam of metal against metal and the screeching protest of the truck’s brakes as it jolted off the road and into a ditch. There was a moment of shock, cold water dumped on his entire world, adrenaline roaring through his veins with urgency. Corvo got out of the truck, entirely too mindful of his gun in its case under the seat. The mark on his hand throbbed as four men backlit by the setting sun and wearing strange gold masks rushed at him. 

Corvo fought them with all the frustration and rage that had been simmering in him since he watched Jessamine’s body fall lifeless onto the floor. He fought with the helplessness and hopelessness wrought by losing the love of his life, his job, his identity. He fought like a devil and soon two of the attackers were on the ground, one out cold from a particularly nasty backhand and the other curled up in the fetal position gasping for breath. If they had laid hands on him even once, he hadn’t felt it. 

A new figure moved in front of the car as Corvo turned around. Something bulky and metal was strapped to his chest, making him look like some kind of organ grinder. He stepped deliberately towards Corvo with the handle of the thing turning a silent rhythm in his hand.

Sudden and all-consuming pain sent Corvo to his knees. Everything burned and his skin felt about to bubble, his brain shrieking and pulsing and splitting his head in two. Nerves on fire, Corvo slumped farther over, trying with bloodshot eyes streaming involuntary tears to see what in the void was going on.

“He’s a fresh convert, brother,” Said the masked man nearest Corvo. “This should have been easy.”

The organ-grinder was silent. Corvo could barely focus on anything, the pain was excruciating, he was going to pass out. “Agreed. We must reconsider our strategy for taking out Daud, if this is what one of the whelps can do with half a chance.”

Blood dripped hot from his nose to the asphalt and one of the masked figures knelt over his spasming body. It held a surgical looking saw and the figure was grabbing Corvo by his wrist. Convulsing, choking on screams and wishing for death, Corvo watched the figure cut off his left hand. It felt unreal, already so wrecked by the pain from that infernal device, that all he could register through the haze of agony that glowed feverbright around him was the dull repetitive vibration of the saw cutting through his bones. 

It shouldn’t have been possible. He should have passed out from the pain, as he felt his hand separate from his body he wondered why he didn’t, but seeing it there with the blood streaming shocked from the stump snapped something in Corvo.

More animal than human he surged up off the ground, muscles quivering, blood dripping down his chin from where he had bitten his tongue, and a wild haymaker sent the man with the saw flying.

With a feral scream, Corvo launched himself at the man with the organ. The man stopped playing as he hit, and suddenly Corvo’s nerves went silent. It was a relief, a gasp of fresh air, sudden quiet until the screaming pain from the stump at the end of his arm made itself the focus of Corvo’s attention.

They grappled for a second, slippery with Corvo’s blood, until the man kicked Corvo away and scrambled for the car. Corvo wasn’t fast enough, dizzy with blood loss and shaking from adrenaline, and the man burned squealing rubber and then was gone.

Dazed, Corvo picked up his cooling, bloody hand and limped towards his truck. From a hazy distance he knew he was driving, and then he slumped into the wheel, eyes closing, foot still heavy on the steam pedal.

 

 

“I can’t believe I”m helping you,” A voice, cranky, baffled, echoing in his head.

“Though that fight was incredible, I have to say,” The voice dropped, conspiratorial, “You moved like a force of nature, what was I telling you about wasted potential?”

There was a funny lightness to his wrist and Corvo couldn’t open his eyes.

“You could rule the world, that drive and my powers-” a grunt, something tugged at him like he was a leaf snared on a rock in a chill stream “-there we go. Good as new. I’ll expect a lot of gratitude from you for this, you know. Maybe even groveling. I could be into that.”

Someone ran a cool hand through Corvo’s hair and he sighed into it. The hand paused, resting lightly on his temple. 

“Ten days left, and I don’t even think you’re trying. Now wake up, my dear.”

Corvo opened his eyes, the rising dawn gentle on his face. His back hurt, he supposed from sleeping in his truck all night, but when he moved his ribs screamed at him and a quick glance at the bruising there brought the evening’s nightmare roaring back into his mind. Dried blood crackled across his chin when he moved. Bile rose in his throat. 

He looked at his left hand. The marks on the back were still there, and he was fairly certain a couple of the inky tendrils had somehow got longer. His wrist was circled by faint white scars, old and smooth. He wiggled his fingers.

“I’m not a very good heretic. I don’t really know to show my gratitude, so, um, thank you.” Corvo felt a little silly talking to himself, but mostly his head ached and his ribs were unhappy and he had re-opened every last knuckle he had previously split.

Which, as he started up the engine, put a thought in his head. At this point he knew next to nothing about the figures in the masks, but they had known he was marked. Corvo remembered the hand he had found lying on the sidewalk. That the city watch had mentioned more heretic hands with no bodies attached. That Daud was on their hitlist. 

That he had ten days and no leads and literally the only person who would believe him, let alone had even a fraction of the force necessary to make sure Corvo didn’t end up dead after a second attack, was the head of the biggest and most bloodthirsty gang in Dunwall. A man that Corvo had told, in no uncertain terms, to go fuck himself.

Corvo groaned and whacked his head gently against the steering wheel. The horn wailed softly.

“Me too, buddy. Me too.”

 

 

This was a mistake, Corvo realized, as his grimy sneakers deposited dust from the range and the fight onto the polished marble floor of the Rudshore Commerce Center. A few Whalers looked up from desks and tables or peered through open oak doors, and he could sense a few of them circling behind him. 

The tall one from the Hound Pits, one of few Whalers wearing their trademark bandanas, approached him.

“Hello, Trash Mouth. Here for a loan?”

Corvo felt his face heat up. “I need to speak to Daud.”

“Really.”

Corvo could feel her do an admirable job of not rolling her eyes.

“Julian, please take care of-” She waved a gloved hand at Corvo’s entire body, “-this.”

An incredibly tall man with burn scars up one side of his body stepped forward and Corvo found himself landing sharply on his tailbone outside the building. Time to do this the hard way. 

Once he was about a block away from the Commerce Center, he gave a quick glance around, both pleased and insulted that no one had followed him, then started climbing the nearest building. His muscles yelled, his ribs declared death upon his family, but his left hand seemed as strong as it had always been so Corvo hardly cared.

For a split second, though, gripping tight to a drainpipe twenty meters above the ground, the remembered pain of that weird device shot through Corvo like a bolt of lightning. He shuddered, breathing through the wave of fear. He wouldn’t wish that pain on his worst enemy. Which, on some level, was why he kept climbing. He had to get to Daud. 

The noon sun cut pale and chill on his eyes as he surveyed the rooftops. The Commerce Center was three buildings away, but there didn’t seem to be any obvious way to bridge the gap and get onto the roof. His phone buzzed in his pocket.

CORV 4 FCKS SAKE USE THE PWRLINES ✈__✈

I <3 U BUT U R SLOW AS HELL  (• ε •)

From an unknown number. Corvo scanned the power lines, the mark on his hand tickling and rippling and itching with excitement. He picked one close to Daud’s building, pushed, and-

-And was suddenly perched on top of the line like some kind of oversized bird. The sudden rush of adrenaline cracked a giddy grin onto his face. Another push and he was on the roof, practically laughing with the thrill of breaking all the rules physics had to offer. His phone buzzed again.

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

Corvo texted back “THANK YOU” and began surveying the roof for access into the building, still grinning. This had to work. It absolutely had to.

 

 

The thing about weed in Dunwall was that it had a history intertwined like choking roots with the black magic hated by the Abbey. In fact, the two often got lumped together. One type of bored housewife toked up after dropping off the kids at swimming lessons, another held edgy séances in her basement and then tweeted about them. 

Billie threw off the dress shirt she’d been wearing all day and tried to figure out which of her other shirts was the most perfectly pressed. They were all pretty good- Daud’s underbosses had only the best, and laundering was definitely on the list. She grabbed the closest, and, in a moment of rash hope, grabbed a tie that was deep purple instead of the usual black. It was purple like whale viscera. Like a pre-dawn sky in the heat of summer. Like Delilah’s lips.

Weed wasn’t hot on the street like krust, meth, Maggy, or zannacts. Turf wars weren’t fought over it, bodies didn’t get dumped into the river on its behalf, by the void, Billie had even heard of Abbey overseers confiscating weed and then immediately taking it back to the bunkhouses to share with their brothers.

Weed was  _ established _ . Illegal, yes, but there was no flare to it. No risk, and an entrenched market that disliked change almost as much as they disliked looking bad in front of their neighbors.

And Delilah? Infamous, the way Billie hoped to someday be, the way Daud was. Hell, some smitten nobleman had even named a ship after her. Billie had once asked why they had no contracts or dealings with Delilah or her coven, and Daud had scoffed. Said the money was beneath them, said he was in this business for adventure, not pharmacy.

At the time she had accepted this explanation easily enough- she had been jockeying with the other whalers to take on the riskiest assassination jobs, the most dangerous heists, after all. 

But after meeting the woman, Billie was less certain. It felt more like Daud’s blunt dismissal was that thing he did, sometimes, where he gave up before he started a fight when he knew he couldn’t win. It felt like an admission of defeat. Billie guessed that she’d know for certain if she could find out just how much gold Delilah and her coven were bringing in. She knew they had to dodge the Abbey and the Watch same as the Whalers, but she had never heard of a single witch ever getting caught. It was intriguing. 

The date that night was at an estate in the country, where only nobility were permitted land, and Delilah was no noble. As she pulled on her jacket she found herself grappling with the mutually exclusive desires to spy and to just enjoy herself. 

  
  


Daud punched Corvo square in the mouth when he walked through the door to his office. Pain bloomed on his face and yet the first thought that entered Corvo’s head was how glad he was that the blood dripping from his split lip couldn’t ruin a shirt that was already destroyed.

“I fired you, remember? Who the hell let you up here anyway,” Daud said, scanning the empty hallway behind Corvo.

Corvo held up his left hand and spat blood, aiming for the mobster’s shiny leather shoes.

“You’re in grave danger, Daud. Someone is trying to kill you and I’m the only one that can help you stop them.”

Daud’s lips thinned to a flat line. He pinched Corvo’s wrist by two fingers like touching him was distasteful, then stared at the marks on Corvo’s hand for a long beat. Finally he flung the hand away and strode to the window.

“Lots of people try to kill me all the time. I’m pretty good at making sure they don’t.”

Corvo followed him, mouth dry. “This is different. They’re targeting people with...with the mark, and they have this machine that they can use on us, it’s excruciating. The city watch has been finding severed hands all over the city -you can ask them- and when they attacked me they said you were next.”

A whaler appeared in the room, seemingly out of nowhere, and stood silently just inside the door. Corvo tried to calm his sudden panic, this had to work, Daud had to believe him. He had no other option.

“Let them try, then.”

“They’re bringing an army!”

“You may not know this, but I have an army.”

“When they use that machine, you won’t. You’ll just have a bunch of guys lying on the ground wishing they were dead.”

“How the hell did  _ you _ survive, then?” Daud flung the question, eyes still sharp on the jagged Dunwall skyline out the window.

“I’m better than them, you stupid fucker, I bet I could fight all your heretic minions and come out on top, why don’t we test this?” Corvo snarled. What was he doing? Yelling at Daud wasn’t going to work.

“As much as I would enjoy watching my men beat you to a bloody pulp, I’m not pulling them off business for a joke like you.”

“This is serious, why don’t you believe me? I’m here to help!” Corvo flung his arms out. The whaler by the door twitched a little at the sudden motion.

Corvo attempted to run a hand through his hair, got stopped by tangles, then stomped his foot.

“You know what, Daud? Fuck you. I hope they kill you. I hope they use that  _ thing _ on you and I hope they take a long time before they cut off that Curley-glove and whatever baby hand you got underneath. And I hope I’m around to see it, so I can spit on your corpse!”

Corvo spun and made for the door. The whaler, almost apologetically, blocked his exit.

“What was your name again?” Daud was still looking out the window.

“Corvo Attano,” He spat, glaring daggers into the cool dark eyes of the Whaler in front of him.

“Corvo. At some point we’re going to discuss the fact that you only read books and apparently don’t watch TV. Your marks are fresh. What exactly did the black-eyed bastard demand you do?”

Corvo shut his eyes. By the void. He was running out of time, and he was going to have to do this alone, wasn’t he?

“Find an ancient thingie and return it to the Academy of Natural Philosophy.”

Daud turned, finally, and loosened the blood-red Tyvian silk at his throat.

“I won’t ask you what you bargained with, to give up, that’s just rude,” He stepped closer to Corvo, who struggled to keep up a poker face while he reeled from the notion that he could have bargained, instead of just agreeing with whatever terms the deity had asked.

“But I do find the timing interesting. What is your plan?”

“They know you’re marked and they’re coming for you. But they don’t know that you know, so we’ll want to keep that advantage. We’ll need every last one, I think. I’m not saying we use you as bait, but you say you’re tough and I’m willing to believe it. If we can draw them out we can turn the tables.”

Daud nodded.

“And in exchange, you’ll want my many connections and my manpower to find this thing of yours.”

“It was stolen, and it’s probably worth quite a lot to the right people. I’m sure you know every move made in that arena,” Corvo mentally high-fived himself for switching from offensive insults to blatant flattery.

Daud made an approving sound.

The whaler by the door coughed quietly.

“Master, if you keep Corvo close to you it will raise suspicion. We are your men one and all, but it will be a very short while until we know why he is here. And once we know, anyone watching any one of us will know as well. The odds are….not good.”

Did he  _ make _ them call him master? This changed everything. Daud turned from measuring Corvo with his eyes (lingering on the ink on his neck or the dried blood on top, Corvo wasn’t sure) to the whaler.

“I take it you have a solution, Thomas.”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“Today seems to be full of things I don’t like,” and now Daud’s eyes were on the gun-oil on his shirt, the red scratches from rolling on the ground with the mystery attackers, the holes torn in the knees of Corvo’s jeans.

“Martin…” the whaler faltered for a second. “Martin left not too long ago. If this man were to...seemingly replace him, the men would keep just as quiet as they would knowing the truth, yet if the enemy learned of it there would be no loss in advantage.”

Daud clenched his jaw so hard Corvo could see the muscles ripple, and Thomas went completely still.

“Corvo, please tell Thomas how our first interaction went. You do remember, yes?”

“Um, you showed up at my job, made some obscure movie reference and insulted me, so I told you to go fuck yourself. Then you fired me from my job and one of your goons pistol-whipped me.” Corvo shrugged. Who was Martin?

Daud turned on him. “Are you shitting me? It’s The Godfather. You just busted out Of Mice and Men like it was no big deal, but you’ve never seen-”

“Why is that such a big deal?” Corvo interrupted, going red with anger.

“What the hell kind of hipster wonderland do you live in where you can just-”

“-The kind where I keep the law and help improve society, you voids-damned parasite!”

“Your mother should have swallowed!”

“And no one was surprised when your mother didn’t!”

Thomas coughed, and both of them whirled on him.

“It’s an efficient solution, Master. Or do you have a better one?”

Daud, wild-eyed with rage, looked at Corvo. Corvo willed himself to back down. If his stupid fucking mouth ruined this for him he would regret it for the rest of his life.

“Fine,” Daud snapped, walking towards his desk. “But I’m not spending a minute longer than I have to with this philistine. So here’s what I want you to do, Thomas.”

Thomas made a very small bow.

“I want you to give Corvo a neck full of hickeys, clean him up, show him around the place and then send him back to me so we can start in on this mess.”

The bandana the whalers all wore covered most of their faces but Corvo still saw the tips of Thomas’s ears go pink. Corvo suddenly figured out who this Martin must have been and his stomach made a few loop-de-loops to support this conclusion.

“Sir, I-”

Daud cast a stern glance at Thomas, the kind that cut glass or killed kittens. “This was your plan, Thomas. Now carry it out. I don’t want to spend any more time with Corvo than I have to, so please support the illusion that he is my new bit of fluff.”

Corvo watched Thomas’s gloved hands clench, unclench, then tug the bandana down. He stepped closer, then met Corvo’s eyes with a questioning look.

Corvo found that he just didn’t care. His life was forfeit anyway, what were a few temporary blood bruises when compared to that? And the plan  _ was _ good, well, except for the part where he’d have to spend time with Daud.

“Do your worst, kid,” He tried to smile reassuringly. His split lip ached.

Thomas turned an even rosier shade, then pushed up on tiptoes. He brushed off some of the blood and dirt on Corvo’s neck with a handkerchief conjured out of thin air. Corvo tried to ignore how the whaler was trembling. There was a reason Thomas had known all about Martin, wasn’t there? He put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

The kid’s mouth was warm, and Corvo felt a slight pull and some wetness. Then nothing. Thomas drew back, looked everywhere but at Corvo, then tried again. Some suction but not enough and then it was gone. Thomas looked over his shoulder to where Daud was sitting at his desk.

“Oh for fuck’s sake. Do I have to do everything myself around here?” Daud grumbled, then elbowed Thomas out of the way.

He smelled just as good this close as he had that night in the Hound Pits Club, and he tugged Corvo close with unexpected familiarity. Corvo’s stomach did a flip. Daud’s mouth was sure, rough, expert, working red mark after red mark into Corvo’s skin. Lips pressed against the soft skin under his jaw, teeth dragged across his adam’s apple. Corvo felt his skin heating up just as he realized how closely Thomas was watching him. The man’s dark eyes flitted away.

Corvo wondered what he saw, briefly, until a hot circle sucked onto his clavicle distracted him. Corvo closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing normally. He was  _ not _ getting flustered for this fucking mobster prick.

Daud pulled away after an unknowable amount of time and left Corvo with a necklace of dull aches that reminded him of when he had gotten Jessamine’s name tattooed on his neck. Just before Emily had been born. The bittersweet memory helped him push the pleasant sensation aside. Daud was already walking unceremoniously back to his desk. 

“Come with me, Corvo,” Thomas said.

And without another word the two of them left Daud’s office.

They walked down a long hallway with gorgeous wide windows and intricate wood paneling. Corvo could hear swordplay from behind a door they passed, but otherwise the stately building was quiet. 

The silence between them was incredibly awkward.

“Daud will keep his word and we will find your missing item,” Thomas finally said, softly. For a punky looking gangster who had just failed miserably to give a stranger any number of hickeys, the Whaler was incredibly polite. “We have a locker room down here with showers, and I’m sure I can find you something...cleaner to wear. Are you hungry? Fisher was going to make a run to Inn on the Rock for lunch in just a bit.”

Corvo blinked. “Wow, yes, that sounds amazing. Thank you.”

Thomas nodded, but he still didn’t make eye contact with Corvo. 

“Showers in here. I’ll leave clothing in the main room, and you can ask any of us for anything. Some of us are complete assholes, but no one draws blood in the nest so you’ll be fine.” Thomas gestured at Corvo’s left hand. “You should probably cover that up. And-- welcome to the family.”

 

The first thing he noticed upon stepping into the locker room was the extremely well-stocked first aid station by the door. He raided it for some pain medicine, raising an eyebrow at just how many different flavors of prescription heavy-hitters were in there. Corvo estimated there was enough to earn felonies for every Whaler in Daud’s little ‘family.’ 

There was a bone-rune-thingie hanging directly above the first aid. The Heart app didn’t seem to care about it, but, there it was, some odd heretical ornament in an otherwise state of the art locker room.

There were two shower rooms. One of them had a sign that said:

BILLIE’S SECOND FAVORITE HOBBY IS RIPPING OFF YOUR DICK IN THE SHOWER

BILLIE’S FIRST FAVORITE HOBBY IS SHOWERING IN PEACE IN A MANSTANK-FREE ZONE

Corvo gave a begrudging chuckle and chose the shower room that would let him keep his junk.

The water pressure was sublime, and Corvo closed his eyes while dried blood, dust, gun oil, and sweat sluiced off his body. He felt strangely safe. Here, in the belly of a beast that strong-armed the entire legal system in Gristol to bow to his whims, a beast that pushed aside whichever rules he didn’t care to follow, undisciplined and anarchic. 

A beast now also known to be worryingly good at an art only truly valued by horny teenagers. It was ridiculous, but the feeling persisted.

He pulled on fresh clothing -a black band shirt that proclaimed him a fan of  _ Lizzy Stride and the Dead Eels _ and jeans that fit just a little too loose- then wrapped his hands like a boxer, dabbing a little ointment on each of his abused knuckles. 

Clean and not in pain for the first time in entirely too long, Corvo followed the smell of food to some kind of a dining room half full of whalers that sized him up with varying degrees of subtlety. He tore into the bowl of mutton stew Thomas offered him with abandon. Thomas was quiet. Corvo felt like he was being watched just a little too closely, but he brushed it off. Could he blame the kid?

Midway through the meal Thomas sat stiffly up, his eyes rolling back into his head, and then he disappeared. Corvo’s spoon plopped into his bowl. 

A mountain pretending to be a man leaned over from another table. “I love the look on a man’s face when he sees Daud summon one of us for the first time,” he grinned with stew-stained teeth.

The huge man continued his rotation until he was straddling his chair, facing Corvo. He gave Corvo the kind of lewd once-over that made him want to either punch the man or run very far away very quickly. Instead, he settled for another bite of stew and asked, “How often does he summon them?” 

A mean chuckle. Corvo replayed the question through the lens of dating Daud, was briefly embarrassed, then decided that playing jealous wasn’t the worst idea.

“Whenever he damn well pleases. Who are you?” The mountain rumbled.

Corvo found himself reaching up to touch his neck before he even realized he was doing it. Wasn’t he just the perfect picture of the insecure lover? He had a moment of absolute self-hatred before he leaned in and played the part. 


	6. Chapter 6

Corvo fidgeted. 

“Just say it,  _ babe _ ,” Daud drawled. He inched into Corvo’s personal space and Corvo resisted inhaling another whiff of that stupidly intoxicating musk that hung around Daud apparently all the time. Because smelling him? Too creepy. He was not going to stoop to Daud’s level.

Corvo met Daud’s sharp eyes and gave a wan smile.

“Sorry,  _ pet _ ,” and Corvo relished the small wince from Daud at that, “Fine. Her name was Jessamine and she was a cat burglar. She was brilliant at it- she had a background in fine art and genuinely loved danger, she was like Indiana Jones, but if Indiana Jones were adorable.” Corvo found himself smiling a little. Jess had been so singular. So incredibly terrifying and dangerous and curious. Larger than life. Talking about her while this man leaned in close and pretended to want him was a strange sort of sublimation. 

“Kaldwin? I may have employed her, once or twice,” Daud confessed in the gravel tones Corvo was starting to hear as his real voice, not the sharp way he spat terms of endearment at Corvo regardless of whether or not anyone was listening. 

He didn’t want to think about it with Daud’s lips quirking so close to his own, Daud’s voice buzzing in his ear. Corvo focused on the very expensive wainscotting around the walls of the room.

“She was hired to steal this thing called a Holger Device. Some ancient artifact, she was very excited, knew a million facts about it.”

He licked his suddenly dry lips, replaying that moment.

“I found her corpse on the marble floor of the lobby, at the Academy museum.” Corvo kept on examining the path of embellishment around the office’s ceiling. “She- it- wasn’t yet cold. There were signs of a struggle, I-” His voice cracked and he was embarrassed. “-I didn’t know if I could safely call for an ambulance cart or-” He took a shaky breath. “Anyway, she didn’t have the device on her.”

“Do you know who hired her for that one?”

Corvo shook his head. “She hid her records pretty well. There’s a lot about her that I just don’t know. You think that would help?”

Daud grunted. There was a whaler at the door to the office. Daud beckoned him in.

“I need more intel on the Holger Device. The Academy of Natural Philosophy had it. I want to know everything about it: which professors were interested in it, where it came from, who cared about it outside the Academy, anything and everything.” Daud rested his hand possessively on Corvo’s knee, thumb idly stroking along the inside seam of the borrowed jeans. He made it look natural, like he wanted to be doing it, like he wasn’t afraid of the whaler seeing. It took an amazing amount of effort for Corvo not to fling himself ten feet away. 

The whaler left. Corvo took a deep breath and leaned over to exhale just against Daud’s ear. The hand on his knee changed to a deathgrip, Daud shivered like Corvo had electrified him, then his head whipped around to Corvo.

Prepared for the incoming dour glare, Corvo smiled. 

Daud deflated.

“Daud, sweetie,” Corvo said, placing his bandaged hand on top of Daud’s gloved one, “It gives me the creeps when you touch me. I really don’t like it.”

Daud’s face shuttered.

“Everyone can tell.  _ Honey _ .”

“Look, I’m sorry I’m not as talented as you are in pretending to be interested in random men,” and Corvo knew he had crossed some kind of line from the way Daud’s nose wrinkled, “I’m sure I’ll get better at lying with practice.”

“You had better,” Daud growled, rising to his feet and pulling Corvo up with him. “If this stupid plan fails just because you can’t play gay for five fucking minutes, I’ll kill you myself.”

“In your dreams,  _ sugar _ ,” Corvo hissed, pushing until the two of them were chest to chest. “Now honestly, all I really want right now is to go home to my daughter and pretend none of this nightmare,” He gestured vaguely at Daud with his left hand, “ever happened.”

“Listen to me, you bigoted hick,” Daud said, and Corvo reeled. Bigoted? “You will  _ not _ go home to your babymomma’s ill-conceived crotchspawn-”

Corvo slapped him. Hard. Daud grabbed his wrist with a grip like steel and kept talking, close enough that Corvo could feel the man’s breath hot on his cheek.

“-you want your kid caught in the crossfire?”

Corvo frowned. He didn’t want to admit that the prick had a point, but his wrist was also starting to hurt and the missing night of real sleep was starting to catch up with him.

“Fine. I’ll just leave her a note and pick up some stuff. Is that acceptable,  _ love _ ?”

Daud nodded and released his wrist. As he walked away, Daud grabbed his ass and  _ squeezed _ . Corvo yelped, flushed bright red, and fled the room to the sound of Daud yelling, “And start dressing sluttier!”

Corvo wanted to scream.

 

 

Geoff Curnow fussed with the collar on his jacket and pushed down a wave of nerves. This would be fine. It was better to try and fail than do nothing at all. This would be fine.

Mr. Attano’s porch could use a paint job. There was a rocking chair with well-worn grooves under it, an empty can of cheap beer, and a dog-eared copy of  _ Crime and Punishment _ . 

Geoff Curnow knocked on the door and fidgeted with his jacket again.

When Detective Sullivan had told him he was off the case, Geoff had been upset. Understandably so, he thought. He’d been the one dogging the streets, collecting evidence, sifting truths from witness interview after witness interview, ordering tests for the severed hands. There was no justice in Dunwall, he reminded himself, not even enough to let him see the fruits of all his labor. 

It had taken him a while to find a silver lining, which was that if he asked Mr. Attano to coffee it probably wouldn’t get him fired. Unless the Abbey found out, of course.

Mr. Attano squinted in the afternoon sunlight, and Geoff cataloged the circles under his eyes, the split lip, and- Geoff swallowed- and a ridiculous number of hickeys ringing his sculpted neck, blending with the tattoos there in a truly disconcerting way.

Mr. Attano stood there for a second, a half-filled duffel bag in one hand and a tanktop (in this weather?) in the other.

“Captain Curnow, right?”

Geoff couldn’t tear his eyes away from Attano’s neck. He nodded. Mr. Attano shifted awkwardly, and set the duffel bag down.

“Did you need something? Is there any progress on the case?”

Geoff finally forced himself to meet the man’s eyes. “I...just wanted you to know that I’m off the case. Should the watch contact you again, it will be through Detective Sullivan, Dunwall Tower. Here is my card, though, if you should ever need...”

“Oh.” Mr. Attano tried to hide the confusion in his voice. “Okay, uh, thank you for telling me.” He held the card in his hand awkwardly, like he didn’t know what to do with it.

Geoff gave a plastic smile and turned to walk away. He willed himself to not run. No justice, not in this voids-damned city. No justice at all.

 

 

Corvo continued to feel like screaming. He was almost dizzy with exhaustion by the time he had finished writing Emily a letter and driving back to the Rudshore Commerce Center. It must have shown because Daud had taken one look at him, smiled nastily at the black undershirt Corvo was wearing instead of a t-shirt, and then ordered him to “go sleep until I can’t see the fucking void underneath your eyes, black-eyed bastard has enough property already without you giving him more for free.”

Which would have been fine, except now his toes were sinking into rich carpet in the middle of an absolutely opulent bedroom as he stared blearily between a huge bed and a sturdy couch. 

He knew he should take the bed -it’d be an easy way to perpetuate the fake relationship- but there were more pillows on that thing than seemed physically permitted for the space, and it looked soft enough to smother him. He really,  _ really _ wanted to pass out on the couch. But what if someone noticed? What if Corvo slept through until the next day and Daud came in and he wasn’t in the bed? Or, worse, what if he was? Corvo had the briefest image of getting spooned by the stone faced mobster in a forest of ornamental pillows and nearly lost it.

He lay down on the couch and sighed. It was big enough for even his long legs and it smelled like Daud. He was too tired to pretend he didn’t really like that. The man may have been a walking symbol of everything Corvo hated but damn if he didn’t smell incredible. As sleep overtook him, Corvo wondered if maybe it smelled like Daud because the prick slept on it, not in that huge formal bed. He  _ wouldn’t _ , would he? Corvo grumbled, thinking to move, but then the fuzzy warmth of unconsciousness won the battle and instead he drifted off into nothingness.


	7. Chapter 7

Borrowing transportation was the first thing Billie taught new recruits. Some key-like piece of her mind said hello to the ignition and soon the sleek shape of a stubby sports bike was purring beneath her as she rode out of Dunwall. 

Daud had not been pleased to learn that Detective Sullivan, The Torturer, was back on Dunwall’s streets. Which would have been fine, but he had ordered Billie to take care of it so that he could focus on some ‘pressing business’ he couldn’t tell her about.

Billie loved Daud fiercely. Billie respected Daud. But there was a limit to how much of his job she could do without resentment clawing at her throat.

As white country street signs whipped by and the moon rose, Billie wondered if this was it. Serve beneath Daud, and for the rest of her life do all his work so he could take the credit?

He didn’t even realize he did it. Billie was so quick, so efficient, guessed his mind before he even knew what he wanted. She’d become a third eye and he’d never even questioned his new sight.

The audacity of the man. 

She hated it just as much as she wanted that kind of arrogant and deeply patriarchal power, the confidence Daud had in keeping the whole city’s underworld in line. 

The moon glowed green and lopsided behind a sprawling monster of a country manor house. Ivy crawled possessively over white marble statues gleaming in the darkness of the yard. Deer grass bunched thick and tall between wild fruit trees petulant and barren. There was a scattered collection of ratty old cars, gnarled willows curved into grotesques by what Billie thought was probably a duck pond. When she cut the engine, Billie could hear an aggressive bass line thumping from inside the well-lit mansion. 

The door whumped wide open and yellow light spilled across the cobblestones.

“You found the place, good,” Delilah called, stepping through a dilapidated set of columns to give Billie a hug that consisted of a light press of bony hands on her shoulders and the ghost of expensive formalwear against Billie’s riding leathers. Billie felt even tenser than before. The bass beat in her chest.

“What’s the racket?” She asked as she followed Delilah in.

Delilah waved a dismissive hand. “My sisters are throwing a party. They’ll be at it all night. They even persuaded a pair of Overseers to join them, can you imagine?” 

The foyer was enormous. Delilah led her up creaky stairs, through a hallway lined with glass-eyed animal heads, turned, through a musty library silent as a tomb, then to a sitting room with plush couches from the last century and brocade curtains tied open to let the moon’s light pour in. Soothing lavender smoke curled up from a bone smudge bowl set precariously close to the edge of a cedar sea chest.

“Well?” Delilah smirked with purple lips, then gestured vaguely to everything around her. She was a glowing figure in pristine white, standing in a dark home of witchy trappings and macabre esoterica deep in the green countryside. Billie had never been so intrigued. 

“What do you think?”

“I think,” Billie unzipped her jacket. “I think it has been a fucking miserable week and it’s good to get out of Dunwall.”

“Then I have a plan. No talk of Dunwall this whole night. None of this ‘so what do you do’ nonsense, nothing about the traffic or the walls of light or anything to do with the city,” Delilah held out a pinky, her eyes sparkling.

Billie laughed and pinky-swore. This was an entirely perfect solution to her earlier dilemma. “And what will we do if one of us messes up?”

“A rule-maker, this one!” Delilah cried. “You need parameters to operate in, Billie Lurk?”

Billie stepped closer to Delilah with all the swagger she could muster. “It’s not that,” She paused to ham it up. “I just want to know what kind of...punishment to expect.”

Delilah’s laugh was a burbling stream. “Fine. If either of us fucks up, we have to go hang out with my sisters and whatever’s left of their lame friends.”

“All or nothing, huh?”

“All or nothing.” Delilah smiled and sat down on a couch, rich burgundy and only a little frayed, then gestured with ring-encrusted fingers at a hookah tucked next to it. “It seems predictable to ask, but do you smoke?”

Billie sat down on the ottoman. She looked out the window at the stars. Billie felt wild, free, like this night could be anything she wanted it to be.

“Sure.”

If this was an attempt to get Billie to mention Dunwall by way of Delilah’s empire it wasn’t going to work.

She watched Delilah pour water into the glossy glass basin at the bottom of the hookah, then expertly pack a mix of orange shisha and weed into the bowl. She fiddled hoses, foil, coals, then lit them with a zippo that proclaimed “Barrister Timsh,” a family crest, and the motto “Eminent Domain.”

Delilah’s face glowed warm in the lighter’s brief fire.

“This piece is beautiful,” Billie gestured to the hookah. “Where did you get it?”

“Many years ago I studied long and hard, apprenticed to a man who used me for my gifts but would not acknowledge my worth,” -BIllie’s stomach flip-flopped because, oh, she knew that song and dance- “and my master had many supplicants who wanted things from him.”

Delilah paused to inhale through the pipe with a rising ribcage and relaxed lips. She paused, eyes flicking briefly up to meet BIllie’s, then exhaled an unfurling blossom of lazy, thick smoke.

“Some of the supplicants thought gifts would reach him. They did not, the man had no energy for anyone but himself, but I took this elegant little device so I suppose his failings are my gain.”

Billie took the pipe, still wet with the inside of Delilah’s mouth, and pulled in sharp orange and clinging weed all at once. She let it sit in her mouth, the smoke damp and thick, then breathed a dense and swirling cloud.

“So he should have been bribable, you mean?” She asked, combative.

Delilah hummed.

“He should have seen them for what they needed, I think. You get farther in life if you can do that. He didn’t seem to see anyone but himself and his desires. We....disagreed on that and a number of other things, so I left.” Delilah took a long pull on the hose.

Billie would have been caught in a reverie, thinking about Daud and what she needed, except for the sudden closeness of Delilah, close enough that she could feel the warmth from her lips, and Billie leaned into it. 

This was bold and abrupt, really, but it was somehow refreshing to skip the song and dance of getting to know this stranger, save it for later, or maybe never and so Bille parted her lips. Waxy lipstick melted into her. She breathed in the rush of smoke that Delilah shotgunned. She pulled Delilah’s quick tongue in as well, greedy, until at last she pulled back to tilt her head to the moon and breathe silver smoke in an exultant nimbus.

Delilah was there at her exposed throat as she gazed heavy-lidded at the moon, sharp teeth against soft skin, then soft lips suckling against the flesh of her earlobe.

Billie shuddered.

Time collapsed. At first the kiss was a playful back-and-forth, testing limits, language, a quick shove of tongues, the barest hint of teeth, Billie’s lower lip pulled into Delilah’s mouth until it stung, Delilah’s tongue a hot pulse she sucked in. Lavender, orange, skunky weed, smoke floated around BIllie as her mouth sank into the spaces Delilah allowed her. 

They separated and the moon was full and large behind Delilah, and the woman was flushed and blinking.

“I, um, I was going to cook dinner. You hungry?” And Billie loved how Delilah’s voice hitched, how she pressed a quick finger to her lip as if to make sure she was still in one piece.

Feeling warm and hazy and relaxed Billie stood and offered a hand to Delilah.

“Do you want help in the kitchen?”

Delilah nodded, and Billie followed her downstairs.

 

 

Corvo came awake, disoriented for the second it took for him to remember where he was. Someone had covered him with a blanket. In the grey silence of the room he could sense another person, their quiet rhythm of sleep, and he squinted at the bed. Empty. He looked around and realized that there was a Daud-shaped mass curled up on the carpet by his feet.

A strange parade of affection marched through his chest as he tried to make out details of the sleeping mob boss in the dark. Just the sliver of a brow, a shoulder defined by streetlight, nothing tangible. Nothing that gave Corvo a single insight into the man with the ridiculous bed who preferred to sleep on the couch or, apparently, the floor.

Corvo shut his eyes and tried to will himself back to sleep. He hoped Emily was okay. He had started imagining for just a second that he would be able to find out who killed Jessamine, and bring them to justice, when a cellphone buzzed.

Daud stirred, a sudden intake of breath and heavy movement, grunted into the phone, and stood. Corvo pretended to sleep while the man shrugged on clothes.

Then he left, the hallway outside bathing the room in pale green for just a second. Clear-headed and calm in a way he hadn’t been in quite a while, Corvo got up to follow him.

Daud’s solid form blocked the skeletal lights on the way down to the basement in arrhythmic flickering gaps, and Corvo kept his footsteps completely silent as he followed. Two floors away, he stopped.

At the bottom of the spiralling rounds of concrete and ironwork, there was a man slumped in a metal folding chair. The industrial light was stark, its shadows sinking eye sockets and burying hollows of cheekbones in the small huddle of Whalers waiting expectantly by the chair. None of them were wearing their masks. Corvo’s stomach dropped when he noticed that detail.

Daud didn’t look at the man in the chair, he turned his back to the prisoner and Corvo heard the hiss of a match and then smelled sweet musky smoke as one of Daud’s men lit a cigar for their leader.

Then he turned around, illuminated by the hellish glow of his cigar’s cherry and ghosted by the green sickness of fluorescent light behind him. He looked a monster in shirtsleeves and he smiled, veiled in smoke, with death on his teeth.

Corvo watched, hypnotized, as without preamble Daud stepped in and broke three of the man’s fingers. Screams echoed in odd harmonics up the stairs.

“That,” Daud said at last, voice gravel, “Was for the Whalers you killed.”

The man sputtered, stuttered, “I didn’t kill none of yours, I swear it-” then his babbling was cut off by Daud slapping him hard enough to draw blood from his mouth.

Daud stepped back and waited for the man to compose himself. Corvo suddenly realized that he was biting his own lip and leaning over the railing. Appalled, he moved back into the shadows. This Daud was terrifying. This Daud was a knife, maybe a scalpel, all dispassionate cruelty and menace. All Corvo had seen up until now was a grumpy man who was quick to argue about stupid shit and order his minions around. This made sense. This was a shark in bloodied waters. This was his element.

“Nurse Trimble, you did, and instead of coming to me and paying points like every other gang in Dunwall, you lied and tried to hide it. You even tried to blame the Bottle Street Gang.”

Daud pulled long and slow on his cigar, examining the shaking man below him, eyes completely obscured by the harsh shadows.

“I have brought you here to correct some misinformation you somehow gained. But first, I want you to know that my men are dear to me. These gentlemen here,” and Daud circled his hand quickly to include the Whalers present, smoke eddying in his wake, “were close to the departed. They have requested some comfort. I am going to oblige them.”

The next bit was quick and awful. One by one, the gathered Whalers stepped in and hurt the man in the chair. Screams, blood, at one point the crunch of bone, but Corvo watched Daud. Daud took mental notes on the choices of his men, judging their performance or their meanness or both Corvo wasn’t sure. Did Daud watch Corvo so carefully? Or had he already been written off as a nightclub’s bouncer, hired muscle that for some reason had caught the interest of a notoriously inscrutable deity? 

When the violence was over Daud rejoined the tableau. Trimble was coughing up blood, so Daud knelt, patted him on the back, and looked him in the eye.

“What you need to understand is that you will never get away with anything like that, and you need to stop trying.”

Daud stood, waited until the man’s head lolled up to watch him, and then he lifted up one gloved hand in a beckoning motion.

Trimble was pulled up out of the metal chair as if powered by steam and hung there, a good five meters up, twitching and terrified. Urine ran down his leg, and Corvo heard it patter onto the ground.

Daud’s hand relaxed and Trimble dropped onto the concrete floor. Daud stood over him.

“Someone lied to you, Trimble, when they told you that the Whalers were ordinary men. We are not. But you are, and I don’t know if you’ll survive another session like this.”

Trimble made a whiny wet sound, and Daud turned to walk up the stairs before Corvo had a chance to start moving. 

Corvo froze, and Daud looked at him with eyebrows raised. Then he walked past. Corvo followed Daud back up the stairs. They didn’t speak.

When the two of them reached the bedroom, still and dark and undisturbed, they paused in the doorway. Corvo looked at the bed, the couch, the spot on the floor where Daud had slept at his feet.

“I need a drink,” Corvo found himself mumbling. Daud looked away, turning the cigar in his hand.

“Do you want to join me?” Corvo asked.

Daud met his eye, something uncertain in the calculations Corvo was starting to identify there. “Do you actually want me to join you, or are you just saying that so it doesn’t look like you’re fleeing my presence?” And there was something about the blood spattered on Daud’s white shirt that seemed to encourage honesty.

“I want you to come,” and Corvo had it out of his mouth with wholly innocent intentions before he realized what he said and the two of them were sniggering against the door frame like thirteen-year-olds.

“Fine,” Daud grinned.

Corvo dressed quickly, then paused to look at Daud. “Your, um. Your shirt.” 

Daud grunted, peeled out of it and into a clean one. “So where are we going?”

Corvo smiled. “Take a wild fucking guess, Suit.”

 

 

At one AM the Hound Pits Club was a swarm of shrieking swaying drunks showing a lot of skin and flashing a lot of cash. Corvo didn’t recognize the new bouncer, but a glance from Daud got them in the door and Corvo found himself gripping the mafia prick’s arm as they elbowed their way through the crowd.

The din was nearly unbearable and Corvo felt old for the first time in a while. Apparently Lizzy Stride and the Dead Eels were playing the club and when they weren’t screaming into the mic they were pounding bass like it would bear them offspring and every young body in the place was thrashing to their animal cries.

“My men like this shit,” Daud grumbled, “I think it’s the only reason they’re popular.” And sure enough, when Corvo swept the room he spotted little gaggles of well-muscled people with heavy boots and a few too many scars to mark them as part of the general crowd.

Corvo beckoned Cecelia over, and when she gave a glance she stopped midway through a beer pour and gave him a hug across the bar. Corvo was relieved to see that she was still wearing the same ratty old shirts and men’s jackets as always. Her barbacks were dressed like they worked at the Golden Cat, but Cecelia was just as she always had been. He smiled.

“What’ll you have?” She murmured close, above the din, and Corvo said back in the same barkeeping tones, “Whatever the asshole in the suit is buying,” and then he watched Cecelia’s face move through the motions of disbelief to concern to reprimand.

Daud gestured, and soon Corvo was staring at a small tumbler of amber whiskey. Of course. He tamped down on his immediate irritation. They had gone a full hour without screaming at each other, and Corvo wasn’t about to ruin it by telling the prick that his taste in booze was pretentious.

Daud held up his glass between gloved fingers. “To The Outsider.”

Cautiously Corvo clinked his glass against Daud’s. The liquid felt warm against his throat, and it tasted like campfires under star-speckled wild skies. Okay. Maybe pretentious was the wrong word. Corvo found himself relaxing, in spite of the frantic music, the crowd, the way Daud’s thigh slotted heavy and solid against his own.

“So why don’t you sleep in your bed?” Corvo yelled into Daud’s ear.

“I can’t believe you’re actually wearing wifebeaters,” Daud yelled back and flicked a gloved finger over Corvo’s bare biceps.

“That is a terrible term for an article of clothing. And you’re dodging the question.”

Daud slammed the rest of his fancy whiskey and closed his eyes. He had long lashes, Corvo realized, pale against his skin, easy to miss.

“The bed is too soft. You clearly held the same opinion, Corvo.”

Corvo nodded. This wasn’t going well, was it? What was Daud’s problem? He was cool and in control when smashing an old man’s face in, but a grumpy pile of rusty nails whenever Corvo tried any type of question.

He copied Daud, letting the expensive liquid set fire to his belly all in one swallow. And then they sat there in an awkward silence, the club thumping around them, still pressed close in the overcrowded space. Daud gestured again and two more whiskeys appeared, accompanied by a worried glance from Cecelia.

“Daud,” Corvo said, close, into the man’s ear, realizing how rarely he actually spoke the bastard’s name, “It seems like everything I do pisses you off.”

Daud looked shocked for a millisecond, before replacing it with his usual expression of mild disapproval.

“What did I do?”

Daud barked a laugh, then stared vacantly at the bottles in front of him. “Is this the part where I finally get to grill you on how you don’t know movies but you’ll pull obscure book references out of your ass like anyone will even get them?”

Corvo frowned. “Well you got the only one I pulled, anyway, so I don’t see your point.”

Daud fixed him with an icy stare. 

Corvo relented.

“Look, I’ve always been a bookworm, but when I was in prison there was nothing else. The library was my lifeboat.”

“ _ You _ were in prison,” Daud said, a question in his voice, and Corvo’s heart sank. Daud  _ had _ written him off as cheap muscle. He hadn’t looked into Corvo’s background, hadn’t found out that Corvo had 20 years of service to royalty and elected officials, both as a Royal Guard in Karnaca and a private bodyguard here in Dunwall. Daud didn’t have any idea how much it was messing with him to be this close to the lawless killers that he had fought against his entire life. Daud hadn’t thought he was even worth a cursory background check.

“I’m going outside,” He murmured, setting his empty glass down. Why did that bother him? It shouldn’t. Four days ago  _ he _ hadn’t known who Daud was. 

Corvo sagged against the brick exterior of the Hound Pits’ back patio. What a fucking awful idea all of this was. He imagined leaving now. Walking home, glancing into Emily’s room where she slept like a tiny belligerent log, crawling into his own bed, forgetting any of this had ever happened. He imagined the house exploding as the mysterious attackers realized he was home. He sighed and brushed a hand against the bone charm still wound in his hair. There was no going back, was there?

Corvo bummed a cigarette off of a group of tipsy patrons. He had just exhaled his first drag when Daud appeared, looking vexed. Corvo slumped back against the wall and offered Daud his cigarette. The mafioso took it, and Corvo found himself hypnotized by the man’s mouth, the slight hollowing of his cheeks, the way he pursed his narrow lips to push smoke away from both of them.

“Martin insisted on the bed. To this day I’m not sure if he genuinely preferred that marshmallow deathtrap, or if he did it for one of his endless mindgames with me.”

Corvo blinked.

Daud held the cigarette out, and Corvo took the peace offering.

“I was in the military academy back in Serkonos, when I was a kid,” Corvo said, then sucked in, welcoming the harsh pleasure in his lungs, “And I had this friend. He liked kissing me and I guess I liked it too. We fooled around a bit and then one day he got kicked out and I didn’t,” Corvo sent smoke curling out his nostrils, irritated that he was even bringing this up. This wasn’t fucking therapy- not two hours before he’d watched this man break fingers like it was a household chore.  _ And you liked it, _ a traitorous voice within whispered.

“Prison...made me think about all of that again. I hadn’t, you know. Um, before that, I had Jess, we had a  _ kid _ , and it’s easy to go with the flow…I was so in love with her. I still am,” He trailed off and distracted himself by passing the cigarette back to Daud and taking in the line of ships and glowing harbor lights in the distance. When at last he let himself look, Daud was frowning, the cigarette forgotten as he stared off into nothing.

Corvo snatched the cigarette back with quick fingers, smiling when Daud finally noticed it was gone. He moved it away when Daud reached for it. Daud glowered. This felt familiar, like they were finally back on solid ground. Corvo relaxed, grinning, and waved the cigarette just out of Daud’s reach. Daud twitched his hand and Pulled it towards him. Corvo rolled his eyes, stole it back the second Daud stopped misusing his arcane powers, and before he knew what was happening the two of them were nose to nose, fighting over a half-burned cigarette.

Laughing, Corvo held up the cigarette. Then all of the sudden Daud’s mouth pressed warm and firm against his. Corvo dropped the cigarette in surprise. Daud caught it and took a triumphant drag, still inches from his face. Corvo found he was shaking.

“I guess it’s no surprise that someone like you plays dirty,” He spat, a sour taste in his mouth even as he said it. 

Daud’s jaw dropped, then his face shuttered back into its usual blank frown. He tossed the cigarette into the river. Neither of them spoke. The moment dragged on. Corvo willed himself to stop shaking, to not think, to not run as far away as he possibly could.

“I’m done here. Tomorrow we try baiting the attackers. Be ready,” Daud said stiffly, then he turned and vanished into thin air.

 

 

The kitchen was cold and expansive and there was some kind of ridiculously ornate tile backsplash with a pastoral scene painted on it. Delilah’s hands were sure, practiced, elegant as they stretched dough for the pasta-maker. But Billie’s mouth was eager for more contact.

They soon fell to whacking each other with flour-besmirched hands as Billie interrupted cooking with kisses.

“Do you want to starve, you heretic?” Delilah laughed as Billie wrestled her hips away from the counter so she could more easily grab at Delilah’s ass while kissing her breathless.

“No! I don’t want to die out here in the sticks, a city kid like me!” Billie adopted desperate tones but Delilah’s eyes lit up at the word ‘city,’

“That does not count,” Billie said. “And you thought I was one for rules!?”

Delilah lowered her eyes to the pasta she was pushing through the machine. “I just like to win, Billie. You should know that-- I really like to win.”

There was flour smeared across one high cheekbone and her shirt was half-unbuttoned and Billie was entranced by the way the tendons of Delilah’s wrists moved as she held a pot under the sink and waited for water to fill it. She crowded in, reached behind her to turn off the tap, put the pot to the side. Then with a satisfying yelp from Delilah, Billie picked her up and set her on the counter. Dizzying minutes passed, Billie’s hands warm around Delilah’s waist, both caught up the slide of invading tongues and muffled sighs, escalating into sharp tugs of teeth against warm lips, an intimacy of nearly shared breath, Billie’s hands sliding farther up Delilah’s back. Billie heard rather than saw Delilah’s fingers scrabble against the counter. They knocked over a knife block and a dozen sharp silver blades spun over the counter and danced on the floor. Billie registered their spill as a series of snapshots in her peripheral vision. Her lips were flushed, warm, vibrating.

“You,” Delilah pulled back, her voice husky and tender, “need to sit at the table and let me cook you a fucking meal. This was not how I envisioned this evening going.”

“Should I be sorry?” Billie asked, impertinent, getting a sharp whack on her ass as Delilah turned red in response.

Billie padded over to the table obediently to watch Delilah move around the kitchen like a purposeful maelstrom.

Dinner was delicious, as good food eaten while high can only be. Billie hadn’t known that the texture of pasta could matter, but it did, and the handmade stuff was incredible. They talked, continuing the ‘No Dunwall’ game, of Billie’s brief stint in Tyvia to secure suitable office space for the Whalers and Delilah’s annual sojourn in the deep woods during Fugue Feast. Of childhood pranks and hated school teachers. Of past journeys and dream vacations. The moon had tucked itself demurely behind thick rainclouds by the time Delilah walked Billie out to her borrowed motorcycle. She leaned in for a slow kiss in the late night chill.

“We must do this again soon,” Delilah said.

“A second date? Let me see about renting a U-Haul,” Billie gave a shit-eating grin and Delilah laughed.

“I’ll pick us out some cats. Seven is a good number, right?”

The sound of Delilah’s laughter stayed in her ears as she sped down the empty country highway back to the city, back to all of her problems and all her frustrations. She tried to keep it all in her head, tried to recall precisely the way Delilah tasted, tried to make the dream last for as long as she could, which meant that when she stopped the bike in front of the smoldering wreckage of the Rudshore Commerce Center she was utterly unprepared.


	8. Chapter 8

Some sort of sixth sense screamed that everything was wrong here, but Corvo only started sprinting the minute the white van pulled up alongside Daud. The van door opened. A gloved hand thrust a pistol out at Daud and shot.

The sound boomed in the dead night air and Corvo winced. 

Daud, moving almost too fast for Corvo to see, lunged forward and whacked the gun into the air. It clattered onto the pavement as Corvo got there and the van doors opened.

The mysterious attackers in their dark clothing and sinister masks poured out. Another van skidded to a stop, then a third. Daud took a breath and suddenly he and Corvo were surrounded by Whalers, some half-dressed, confused, others raising fists the very instant they realized what was going on. 

Corvo glanced at the street’s entrance. A city watch steamcar was parked there, blocking the road. He didn’t recognize the broad figure leaning against it, but his heart sank anyway.

And then the fight lept into existence like fire off a match, quick brutal movements and the occasional heart attack of a gun going off. There were bodies on the ground, Corvo’s fists were red with other people’s blood, but he had eyes only for Daud.

The man moved like a human tornado, hurling a gun into the face of an oncoming attacker, then chasing it with an elbow pounding into bloody bone, turning with one fluid motion to fling the man’s heavy body into the next, blocking punches and sending men to the ground with bone-shattering cracks. But there were so many of them.

And then he saw the organ grinder step out of another unmarked van. Corvo grabbed Daud by the sleeve.

“That’s our man,” He screamed, and Daud gestured for whalers nearer to focus on the man with the strange device strapped to his chest. It seemed a futile gesture. The man had already started playing. 

Whalers crumpled like brittle leaves on the ground, sobbing, twitching, useless, and then the soundwave -thrumming like iron spikes through each and every vein- hit Corvo and Daud. Daud gasped, and Corvo was suddenly holding the man up by his sleeve as he sank to the ground. Dizzy with pain, vomit rising in his throat, Corvo reached into Daud’s suit and pulled out the gun he knew was holstered under his arm, warm with body heat, a heavy weight as he hefted it in one hand, unwilling to let go of Daud with the other.

His vision was whiting out. The organ grinder stepped closer, slowly, methodically. Behind him, through the tears of agony and through spikes of pain drilling through his head, Corvo saw a figure in red emerge from the police car to join the other one.

Corvo shot the organ grinder straight through the head. He hardly registered the sound, only the man’s head tipping back and the hellish noise blessedly ceasing as dead fingers stroked against machinery and the man sank down to the pavement.

He collapsed next to Daud, shaking and numb and trying to remember how to breathe.

“I,” Corvo gasped,” fucking told you so!”

Daud hit him, weakly, and Corvo saw that the mobster was shaking too.

Whalers started reacting again, some throwing up, others sobbing in the sudden quiet, the fight restarting again as the attacking force realized their foe was free.

And then the man in red was there, standing over Daud, blue eyes boring holes through him, blind to everything else.

“You!” Daud rasped, and Corvo expected a fight but Daud stayed still.

Then the man in red lifted a gloved hand and shot him.

Corvo hardly realized he had sobbed “no,” before he found himself crouched over Daud’s body, frantic, watching the blood spread fast, too fast, over Daud’s white shirt. He pressed his hand to the wound, one man against the inevitability of capillaries bright and quick, as if there was anything he could do.

The fight raged on in the background as Daud reached up and -was he touching Corvo’s hair? weird, what- then he grabbed at the bone charm Corvo had tied in. Corvo pulled it free, confused, handed it to him while quivering with some unnamable emotion that threatened to drown him as he watched this man bleed out. 

Daud muttered something alien, the charm seemed to leap at his words, and the blood paused in a small pool on his chest. He grinned at Corvo with bloodstained teeth.

“Go put that sweet ass to use, Corvo, find me another. The blood calls them.”

Corvo stood and fumbled around for his phone. He had the Heart app open and buzzing in his hand before he even registered what exactly Daud had said.

Huffing, he rounded a corner.  And then all of a sudden he heard it hissing, heard it in his teeth, heard it rattling around in his bones and his attention snapped to it like a trained dog to its master's voice.

His stomach turned.

So this is what you have become, Corvo, he tried for humor in his head but he needed to know where it was right then and there. The compulsion was so all-encompassing that he felt he might go mad.

His shaky hands could not pull it out of the tree where it was lodged fast enough. Relief coursed through his veins as he sprinted back to Daud. He had a moment where he wasn’t sure if he was relieved that he was free of the compulsion or relieved that Daud would be okay with the bone he clutched. 

Daud took the thing, then breathed deep, calm.

The battle had subsided as well. Whalers nursed their wounds, the dead lay immobile on the ground, and the infernal device that had crippled them all had been snatched up by the fleeing enemy.

 

That was when the entire Rudshore Commerce Center exploded.

 

Coughing, Corvo swept Daud up in his arms and ran as fast as his heavy load allowed. The air was hazy with smoke, concrete dust, the foul smell of used explosives, heavy with the shouts of men, alarm, confusion, the chaos of trained fighters running low on adrenaline. Corvo unlocked his truck by pure reflex, hefted Daud onto the bench with as much care as he could, then nudged in next to him and started up the steam.

It was a good ten minutes later that Daud stirred, looked around, and asked, “Corvo, where are we going?”

Corvo blinked. He was halfway home. And you know what? Fuck it. He rested a hand on Daud’s hip.

“I’m taking you home with me, tough guy,” Corvo gave the hammiest wink he possibly could, and glanced away from the street long enough to see Daud roll his eyes, then quietly sag back down onto the bench.

The night was dark and deep and his little rowhouse was dead silent when Corvo pulled into the driveway. He found himself instinctively reaching out with some part of his mind, and finding Emily’s phone, her powered-off Nintendo DS, the neighbor’s landline, his own computer and no other electronic devices. He had no idea how he’d done it, but he’d just seen a man use bits of cobbled bone to stop blood pouring out of a gunshot wound. It was just easier to accept some realities and keep moving.

He helped Daud into the darkened house and eased him onto the couch, then opened the door to Emily’s room. There she was, tiny head tousled and blankets rumpled around her. A coloring book across her stomach, crayons scattered all around. Corvo could have cried, just then. He walked softly into her room and laid a kiss on her forehead. A bit of blood stayed, tacky against her skin, when he pulled back.

She mumbled something in her sleep. Heart aching, he closed the door.

Daud was exactly where he left him, on the couch, breathing shallowly. Corvo knelt.

“What do you need?” He murmured. The mobster was so pale. So still.

“You got a sewing kit,  _ darling _ ?” Daud smiled with bloodless lips.

Corvo ran to the garage, grabbed what would be needed, and then sprinted back inside.

“That is NOT how you tie a knot!” Daud said, frowning as Corvo fumbled with the thread. Daud’s shirt was off, tossed in a bloody heap somewhere on the other side of the room. His wound bled sluggishly, not enough to be worrying, but really, not great. The wound gaped in an unsettling way across the taut surface of Daud’s pec.

“Is too, Samuel taught me,” Corvo muttered, trying to calm his nerves enough to do it properly. Daud helped push the skin closed while Corvo pulled through with thread, new blood welling up with every puncture.

“I would drive you to a hospital, you know,” Corvo said, trying to focus on what he was doing.

“No!” Daud barked.

“It won’t heal cleanly! You’ll have so much scar tissue!”

“You worried about ruining my dashing good looks? How sweet.”

Corvo shook his head and finished the stitching. Antiseptic, an ad-hoc bandage pad made of shop rags and duct tape, and they were done. Daud pulled the two bits of bone out of a pocket and quietly recited the same nonsense as before.

“I’m getting you orange juice,” Corvo declared, going into the kitchen. He grabbed some painkillers while he was there, wishing the Rudshore first aid kit hadn’t been blown into a million pieces. 

“Just gotta replenish that blood sugar,” He said cheerily, kneeling to hand the glass and the pills to Daud. He already looked better, though, and Corvo felt slightly foolish.

Daud downed the glass anyway. 

Corvo found himself reaching out to smooth the deep furrows on Daud’s brow. He chewed on his lip, staring vacantly at the bloody clothing flung on the floor. There was so much he needed to know. Could Corvo heal himself? How did it work? The thing with the alarm clock? He realized he was still gently stroking Daud’s forehead while Daud held perfectly still.

Emily’s door creaked open.

Corvo stood abruptly to catch her in a hug and swing her around while she yelled, “Corvo! You’re back!”

Corvo grinned and hefted her onto his hip, then hastily wiped the blood off her forehead. She didn’t seem to notice- she was too busy looking at Daud while he stared warily back.

“Who are you?”

“A...friend of Corvo’s,” Daud said uncertainly, like he didn’t know how to act around children. He probably didn’t. Corvo suddenly had the worst idea. With a grin that no doubt looked demonic, he set Emily down.

“I need a shower. Em, get Daud anything he needs. I missed you, sweetie,” He mussed her hair up even more than it already was, then abandoned Daud to the care of his ten-year-old daughter. He bit his tongue to keep from laughing at Daud’s openly horrified face.

 

 

Corvo finished towelling his hair and peeked back into the living room. He blinked. Daud was sitting up, and Emily was leaning against him, showing him her sketchbook and telling him about each drawing in there. Daud nodded periodically, asking questions about some of it. A plate of pop tarts rested on Emily’s knee, half-finished, and Corvo felt a now-familiar twist in the pit of his stomach as he watched them. 

“You, back to bed, you have school tomorrow,” He said, ushering Emily back to her room. He gave her a hug and a kiss and closed the door. Daud watched him from the couch. Corvo felt suddenly nervous. 

“We head out in the morning,” Daud said, closing his eyes. “I need to make sure my men are following procedure, and then we need to go after the Abbey.”

“The Abbey,” Corvo repeated stupidly.

Daud grunted.

Corvo shook his head, the small swell of tenderness he had been feeling for Daud replaced by even more familiar irritation.

“Fine, whatever. Let’s get you into bed, you cryptic fucker.”

“The couch is fine.” 

Corvo grit his teeth. “The couch is not fucking fine. You got shot. There is a normal bed with a real mattress twenty paces away and your dumb ass is getting in it.”

They glared at each other, and Corvo was about to give up when Daud threw his hands up.

“Fine.”

He attempted to stand and staggered. Corvo was under his shoulder in a second. This close and he was dizzy, drunk on the way Daud smelled underneath the smoke and blood and antiseptic. Or, perhaps, he whispered to himself,  _ because _ of all that smoke and the blood. He froze. He could still taste the cigarette from the Hound Pits on his tongue, felt the memory of Daud’s lips on his own, the way the boats bobbed on the Wrenhaven’s deep waters.

A long minute passed, standing there in his own living room, holding Daud up. 

Then Daud laughed like something broken, like rocks on the shore, like waves crashing against the sky, like gravel helplessly turning to sand. And Corvo had a moment of rare clarity. Daud’s cagey behavior and persistent grumpy moods, the way he took any excuse to touch him then withdrew into sullen silence. That he fought fiercely, fearlessly, but could barely look Corvo in the eye.

What a complete and absolute idiot. It took one to know one, didn’t it?

Corvo pulled him in and kissed him. 

He was slow to respond, but like a tidal wave Corvo felt him surge long before teeth scraped over his tongue, before he reached up to set a hand against Corvo’s jaw. Corvo sighed into the kiss like foam dissolving on seawater.

They did an awkward stumble back through the hallway, lips warm and insistent, wet tongues, desperate little noises that Corvo pretended he wasn’t making. Daud snarled into his mouth as they tripped backwards and Corvo fumbled the doorknob at his back, dragging them inside with an arm hooked over Daud’s shoulder and his tongue buried in his mouth.

The backs of his knees hit the bed and Daud pushed him down to his elbows. Corvo looked up at him, a dark figure backlit by the light of the hallway, heart beating a million miles a second, panting through suddenly flushed lips.

“Come on Suit, you scared?” He whispered, reaching out to grab at Daud by the belt loops, pull him close, until he was standing between Corvo’s knees.

“Or is this a bad time to play gay? You  _ are _ injured.”

At that, Daud reached down and grabbed Corvo by the nape of the neck, pulling on his hair until Corvo looked him in the eye instead of the crotch.

“What a piece of shit you are,” He murmured, a hopeless sound in his voice, fingers pushing into Corvo’s hair.

“Takes one to know one, asswipe.”

“Your bedroom talk sucks balls,” Daud grumbled. 

“Would you like that? It would shut me up, wouldn’t it? Choking on your dick?” He was glad it was dark, because his face was suddenly boiling, his stomach an overpopulated butterfly sanctuary. 

Daud was quiet above him, shirtless and bloodstained, a wounded predator. 

Corvo slid from the bed to his knees, hands still on Daud’s thighs. The grip on Corvo’s hair tightened. 

“You really want-” Daud’s low voice was strangely fragile. Corvo ran his hands up to Daud’s ribs, reading the scars there, the warmth, the strength.

“Yeah,” Corvo breathed, yes, he wanted, and at a later point in time he promised himself he’d figure out when, exactly, he started wanting. If that was even possible.

“Corvo, I-” Daud’s stoney voice cracked. “-I have something I need to tell you.”

“You want to thank me in advance for blowing your fucking mind?” Corvo grinned up at him and ran a hand over the rapidly growing bulge in Daud’s pants.

“My mind isn’t in my pants, Corvo, interesting anatomy fact just for you.” 

“Could’ve fooled me,” Corvo smirked, unzipping Daud’s fly, heady with the sensations, the weight of Daud’s cock in his hand, the way his damp hair stuck against Daud’s thigh, the hot feel of velvet skin against rough fingertips.

Daud’s scoff turned into a gasp as Corvo dragged his tongue slowly, deliberately, up his dick. Daud swelled and stiffened under Corvo’s mouth. He made a soft, needy noise that shot straight to Corvo’s groin. Corvo dragged his lips across the tip. Then, barely containing a laugh, he switched his angle and sucked gently on Daud’s balls. 

“You’re hilarious,” Daud managed to grit out, clearly making a gargantuan effort to stay still. Something hurt again, in Corvo’s chest, at how careful he was. 

Corvo swallowed him down.

“Should have known that a trash mouth like yours would be -ah- good at this,” Daud said, his hands finding their way into Corvo’s hair again, gentle, eager. Corvo made an agreeable noise in the back of his throat, intent on wringing more of those noises out of Daud, mouth a slow rhythm along his length. Daud groaned at that, delighted, helpless, sagging finally against the bedroom wall for Corvo to press him into it with forceful hands on sturdy hipbones.

 

At that moment there was the sound of breaking glass and a child’s scream. Then, before Corvo or Daud could even move, the sound of tires screeching away. 

 

And then silence.


	9. Chapter 9

Billie coughed, remnants of the explosion’s foul smoke clinging to her lungs and stinging her eyes. Her men lay in heaps on the ground, Daud was nowhere to be seen, and off in the hazy distance a hulking figure in a city watch uniform watched the chaos through the orange light caught hellishly in the smoke from the blast. Her mind flicked out, crossing the distance with an ease not even Daud could usually manage, and the figure’s smartphone declared him to be Morris Sullivan. 

Rage rose inside Billie like a furnace heating up, slow and steady and red hot and unstoppable. 

She remembered laundry hung on the line, flapping lazy in a hot summer wind, unbearable by Dunwall’s chill standards. She remembered the smell of the lye soap, the way her small hands cracked in white spiderwebs and bled easily. She remembered folding the laundry with her fingertips only, running a critical eye over her work-calloused hands before attempting to fold another article of noble clothing.

She remembered pickpocketing when her hands were too cracked for laundry duty, bumping into strangers and running as fast as she possibly could.

The laundry hung on the line like any other summer day when he came into the yard, huge and official, barking orders to his officers, a well-dressed noble lady watching the operation from the background.

She had been young. The raid, if she thought about her life in a narrative fashion, had ended her stable childhood with the other immigrant kids. She’d gone from there to the street, to gangs, to a desperate feral attack on a noble man, his blood red and hot on the pavement and her teeth bared in defiance.

But the raid was where all that started.

To sum it up: little foreign children without papers or parents snatched for crimes that they did, in fact, commit, but Morris Sullivan would pick his favorites, the noble lady approving or rejecting his choices, and then the children were gone forever.

Years later and Sullivan was a newly-minted detective, Billie a murderer and a junior Whaler. She loved the power. She loved her fellow Whalers, the way the old men took care of the younger ones with abrasive jokes and tea laced with cheap whiskey, hard-boiled advice and brotherly superstitions. They reached out to her too, cautious and skeptical. She remembered how desperate she had been to earn their love.

She felt like she could love Daud. He was a puzzle to be picked apart, completely devoted to their strange dark god and yet also seeing a churchman on the side, devoted there as well. 

Everything was exciting and new, in those days.

She had been learning her powers, sent off on a ombudsman’s journey alone to master the basics, and in the bowels of Dunwall Tower she had found bone charms. She had heard them screaming a block away, and when the void calls it is incredibly difficult to resist. There had been box after box of them, all labelled by year. Hands shaking with need, Billie had looked at them all, filled her pockets, and then noted a box from the year the raid had happened. She had turned around and noticed the Torturer’s equipment. The meat hook dangling, sharp and well-kept, from the ceiling. The grate below smelled of bleach.

Sobbing and retching, she had flung all the bone charms out of her pockets, clattering onto the scrubbed stone floor, and she had stumbled out into the sunlight, her world upside down.

And now he was here, standing shrouded in the fog of a blast that had once again destroyed her home. Billie found herself sprinting towards him, knife in hand, before she even realized she was doing it. He saw her coming, fired three times, she dodged them all, barely containing a derisive laugh, then pushed into him, knife out, his gut the target.

He jostled her out of the way, sword in hand, and then it dragged screaming agony into her calf. Hissing with pain, screaming with rage, Billie brought her knife back up and pushed it right up into his jaw.

They both went down, him gurgling out his life’s blood, her swearing, her vision swimming, struggling to stay conscious. She heard him die, heard him fall completely silent, muscles lax and lifeless, and relief flooded through her veins.

He was dead and she was still there, wincing at the pain, clutching her knife, the thrill of the kill running through her. He was dead and she was alive.

Thomas appeared, out of breath, his mask bunching around his chin, quivering with effort. He looked like he had been crying.

“Get me to a safehouse, Thomas,” Billie managed. He bobbed his head, put his hand on her shoulder, and then they were in a quiet suburban ranch house. White picket fence and everything. Billie could hear tree frogs, throaty and early as dawn approached. Thomas closed the gash on her leg with butterfly bandages, handing her pills and bone charms and then poking her with a needle that had her sighing back into focused thought.

“I wasn’t there for the attack,” She said.

“You killed the torturer,” Thomas said, his tone was subdued as always but there was some undercurrent- excitement, adoration, Billie was never sure with Thomas. She watched him chew on a lip piercing. He looked completely drained. Whatever had happened during the attack, it hadn’t been pretty.

“Killed his ass dead, Thomas,” and if there was satisfaction in her voice, well, she earned it.

Thomas moved into the kitchen, rummaging through the cupboards. Billie rolled her eyes, knowing what he was searching for. Thomas insisted that every single fucking safehouse be stocked with these tube-shaped chips he liked. They were really spicy and they dyed your tongue bright red, your fingers too if you weren’t careful, and for whatever reason Thomas was an addict.

“You want some?” He inquired, popping one into his mouth. She shook her head and got out her phone.

Daud wasn’t answering. Typical. And the fact that it was just expected, that Daud wouldn’t answer his phone even for his second-in-command, just after their base was blown up and their men scattered to the winds, made Billie suddenly very angry again, but this time the anger mixed with grief, with the way she wanted things to be getting spat on by this disappointing reality.

Just below Daud in her phone contacts was Delilah.

Billie watched Thomas enjoy his junk food, noting the tear-tracks down his sooty face, the way he just took huge gulping breaths every now and then like he had to remind himself he could. She thought about Morris Sullivan, dead by her hand, finally avenging the deaths of the children not as lucky as she had been. She closed her eyes and remembered the huge green moon, the taste of Delilah’s lips, the thrust of her tongue, the way she spoke coolly and calmly of separating herself from a master who used her.

She hit ‘call.’

 

 

“An Abbeyman? An Overseer? The  _ High _ Overseer?” Corvo was aware he was now screaming, but his daughter was gone and he was so afraid he was furious, and his mouth tasted like bitter pre-cum and impossibly he felt that somehow his decision to get on his knees for the most infamous mobster in the Isles was the reason why Emily had been taken. He felt horribly guilty and responsible and he wanted to break something. Anything.

“And here I thought you’d approve because he’s a man of the cloth,” Daud said, pulling on his boots, wincing at the movement.

“Ah yes, a hypocrite, enforcing spiritual law he doesn’t follow,” Corvo spat. He towered over Daud, seething. “Just the sort of ex-boyfriend I should have expected. I don’t know what’s wrong with my brain.”

“Too much reading,” Daud suggested.

“You can fuck the hell off!” Corvo snarled.

There was a moment of silence. Daud stared at him, all inscrutable sharp edges. Corvo guessed it was still his move, then, in this stupid fucking argument they’d started the minute Daud mentioned he had a good idea of where Emily had been taken.

Corvo sighed, looked at the ground, and slowed his breathing. “Stop provoking me. I know you feel guilty, but trying to make me punish you for something neither of us could have predicted isn’t going to help her.”

“Corvo-”

“You boasted you had an army. Make them find my daughter. I’m going to go file a watch report, handle things from the right side of the law. As long as I know that you’re out there breaking as many fingers as it takes to find Emily I will be okay. Can you do that?” Corvo clasped one of Daud’s hands in both of his own.

Daud nodded meekly and headed out the door. In the driveway, he paused, then turned.

“I don’t deserve you.”

He said it like it was a fact, an observation, a warning.

“Yeah, you don’t,” Corvo said, trying to keep the tumult from his voice.

Daud vanished into the night and Corvo turned, mulling over the new information he had pulled from Daud’s phone, and how easy it had been to lie to him. He smelled like Daud, he tasted the man still, and he was buzzing with a strange combination of aborted arousal and absolute panic.

He knew what he wanted to break, and it was Teague Martin’s entire fucking face. Or maybe he’d let Emily do it. Knowing he had gone too far and trying to talk himself out of even letting his daughter see how starved for vengeance and power he was at that moment, Corvo also vanished into the night.

 

 

Geoff Curnow was tired. He’d had a late shift on the beat and just finished putting on pyjamas. His bones ached. He hated to admit it but he was still upset at losing the only interesting case he’d had for months- the missing hands with the strange, almost heretical marks. Callista used to tell him he was wasted on the streets, that he was too smart for the daily grind of parking fines and loitering complaints, and he had secretly agreed. Publically, though, he repeated how lucky he felt to be serving Dunwall in any way he could.

He sank into the Geoff-shaped impression in his armchair and flipped on the television.

High Overseer Martin was giving a press conference, all aquiline nose, sharp blue Morley eyes, and blood red velvet vestments.

“The corruption in our city has gone on long enough. I feel, at this moment, that the most prudent thing to do is to quote Stricture and bring these holy words to our city’s ears,” Teague looked down at whatever papers he had in front of him and flicked a tongue quickly over his lips. “It is such a little thing,” and here he paused, for the words were familiar to all who listened. Geoff recited with him, “yet from one spark an entire city may burn to the ground.”

“My fellow citizens, it is common knowledge that agents of The Outsider have held the justice of this city hostage for too long-” and here the screen flashed to a photograph of warlord Daud leaving a glossy steamcar, half his body blurry from the impromptu capture of the camera, “-and our hands have been restless long enough.”

There was footage of men in strange masks, gold, vaguely resembling ancient masks that the Abbey’s leaders had worn centuries ago, fighting hand to hand with men in the trademark bandanas Daud’s men wore. The footage shifted, to focus on Detective Morris Sullivan, watching the chaos from a safe distance. Geoff was suddenly wide awake. Who was shooting the film? 

Geoff was distracted as a dark young woman in Whaler gear came into the shot. She moved fast, and the image was grainy around her edges the way it got whenever black magic was captured on film. In the background power lines bent towards her, paying homage or feeding off her energy Geoff was unsure, and then he blinked as on his television Detective Sullivan was murdered.

The screen cut back to High Overseer Martin’s steely blue gaze.

“My children, the witches are among us. No one is safe until the evil forces that have killed this good man, this detective of Dunwall Tower, this brave soldier, have been brought to justice. The heretics must die. The witches must burn,” Martin spoke directly to the camera, to Geoff, to all of them.

“This is our battle. Let our spirits not fail in this task. No seat of government is too tall for a heretic to be dragged screaming, and no tendril of corruption shall be permitted leniency. I promise you peace for Dunwall, but first, to arms my brothers. The Outsider walks among us and we must turn him away, back into the void from whence he came!” 

The footage ended. A propaganda officer leaned forward and began offering up analysis in an excited chatter. Geoff tuned him out, mind reeling. Sullivan was dead. The church wanted to stamp out corruption. If there was ever a moment for Geoff Curnow to step up, incorruptible and singular in his devotion to the justice Dunwall had always lacked, this was it.

The news continued to tick past Geoff’s eyes as he thought about how best he could help the Abbey of the Everyman in their quest to wipe the mark of The Outsider from the streets of Dunwall.

 

 

Billie’s tongue shoved deeper into Delilah Copperspoon’s mouth. It came back bitter and malevolent, dragging out an earthy moan that made the solitary houseplant in Billie’s studio apartment spring new leaves and face the approaching dawn.

She sucked Delilah’s bottom lip into her mouth, just on the painful side of firm, and Delilah took the opportunity and explored. Took inventory. Took possession.

Billie shuddered and Delilah was there, clever mouth beckoning her on, tongue flicking over her own, tracing hungry over the edge of her mouth, wet and warm and dark with secrets.

Billie bit back and Delilah hissed into the sting, shoved a skinny thigh between Billie’s legs and Billie arched into her sheets with every single exquisitely trained muscle begging for action, for hard work, for sweat, for hours of fucking and the rushing cliff of orgasm pushing agonizingly closer until she was off it and into the static void beyond.

If Delilah was a flame between her legs then Billie was the moth, dazzled with adrenaline, endorphins, no sleep, butterfly bandages on her toned leg and fully-justified murder singing through her pulsing red blood.

Delilah pushed her into the mattress and with one skilled hand thrust in, the sensation overwhelming, lips a gentle contradiction at her neck as long fingers throbbed suddenly inside her.

Billie gasped.

Delilah pulled out, pushed up on one elbow, a devious smirk on her flushed face.

“Impatient,” She murmured, teasing, delighted. Billie canted her hips and rolled once, sharp, a little hysterical, against the smooth surface of Delilah’s thigh. Delilah smirked and let her grind.

Billie locked heated eyes with her and they were suddenly at war, both flushed and urgent and absolutely willing to fight, scratching nails and too-tight grips.

Then Delilah slapped her. Cheek warm and stinging, growling, Billie reflexively rolled them until she had the florist pinned beneath her.

Delilah put her arms around Billie’s suddenly tense shoulders, and wriggled. Pert, aggressive little nipples. The barest hint of rib. Ticklish pubic hair and soft skin. Billie closed her eyes. Shuddered. The way Delilah’s body felt against her own was almost enough to push her over, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Not yet, at least.

“Tell me what you need,” Delilah demanded. Her voice was steady, controlled, but Billie could hear the storm beneath, the screaming bottomless desire. She wondered if this was what The Outsider saw in her, if this raging tempest of  _ want _ was what drew him in. Delilah’s hand was cool against the skin she had just slapped, and Billie sort of wanted her to do it again. 

“I want to make you happy,” Delilah said.

So Billie rolled them again and let herself fall open, her strong callused hands encouraging against the smoothness of Delilah’s ass.

She brought Delilah’s left hand towards her mouth, sucked with agonizing slowness over each finger, bit gently on her knuckles, bit harder against the purple veins of her wrist, traced with swollen lips the shape of The Outsider’s mark on top. Delilah watched, hooded blue eyes entranced, her breath halting completely every time Billie touched the mark and Billie wondered what it felt like. If it felt like anything at all.

Suddenly hot with jealousy, Billie moved the marked hand to her own breast and arched back. 

“Fuck me,” She commanded. Delilah laughed a harsh animal sound and complied like the order was the only thing she had ever wanted. The push of Delilah’s hand against her chest, the pulsing frantic fighting of all her other muscles, against vulnerability, racing it, skittish and hypnotized, Billie fixed on slick fingers thrusting into her, the way Delilah’s elbows and knees forced her legs farther apart, the way she bucked and carried Delilah up with her as those fingers crooked inside her to push screaming pleasure into her body.

Something unnatural whispered through the room and Billie found herself pressed into the mattress as Delilah pushed herself up and took a nipple into her mouth and sucked, hard, then bit. 

Billie fought it, bucked up, her muscles desperate with the effort to no avail. Delilah’s mouth covered the curve of her breast with teeth marks. Billie gasped, greedy, flexing and fighting and hungry for more. Whatever arcane power Delilah had summoned held her there, still, struggling. Billie felt raw. Delilah’s mouth bit and sucked at her sternum, fingers still thrusting in and out of Billie, wet and urgent, an overwhelming counterpoint to the distracting pain of sharp teeth on her chest. Billie could scream.

The room suddenly smelled of roses, of sun-warmed soil, of musty books and beneath everything rot. Then the unnatural force in the room retreated, unfurling and dissipating, swallowed down into the void. Delilah pulled her fingers free and Billie trembled. 

Delilah’s smile was predatory and Billie found herself shaking as Delilah pushed her legs farther apart, then brought her mouth down to velvet agony against her clit.

“Fuck, Delilah,” Billie panted, hands coming instinctively to curve against Delilah’s skull, fingers catching in her short black locks.

Delilah’s tongue was insistent on the flushed arch of her clit, and Billie’s hips twitched with every lick Delilah offered.

A short hot stripe up Billie’s perineum was a crack of dry wind, the tell of a storm, a torrent. Then Delilah’s teeth rasped the barest of threats against the plump flesh of Billie’s clit and suddenly Billie was over the edge, muscles shouting, pleasure gathering like slow electricity through her veins, dimly aware of the way Delilah wrapped her arms around her thighs and pushed the hot length of her tongue through the wave of Billie’s orgasm to draw another out of her agonized and sensitive flesh. Billie sobbed, came again like the sharp flash of lightning immediately after overwhelming thunder, and then fell silent and still.

Delilah slunk up her body, once again a warm slender human instead of a goddess. Billie wrapped her arms around her and shuddered, mouth attempting through trembly kisses along Delilah’s neck to communicate just how amazing it all had felt.

“So did you win?” Billie finally asked with a rough voice, echoing their earlier conversation.

“You still owe me a second date,” Delilah said and soon the two of them were giggling, naked, exhausted in Billie’s bed, ignoring the soft sound of rainfall as Dunwall’s timid sun crept over the horizon. Smelling sex and feeling nothing beyond the pleasant throb of her own blood in her veins, Billie fell asleep with Delilah curled against her. The Whalers could wait. This, right now, was what she wanted.


	10. Chapter 10

There was an animal inside Corvo’s chest, clawing to get out, a feral howl of rage he disdained at the best of times and just barely held at bay at the worst. His feet hit the cobbled stones one after another, a sure and predatory lope, his lungs full of his city, his territory, his turf. His claim was ahead, perhaps more specifically this was a mating ritual, a challenge from new to old, dominance, something embarrassingly primal, whatever it was Corvo felt it in his heart, in the pulse of his blood. He wanted his prey disemboweled across the Abbey’s white marble floors, he wanted the man to hurt, he wanted Teague Martin to breathe no more and the monster beneath his skin howled for freedom.

His phone buzzed.

Irritated, he pulled it out. A text, from an unknown number. Of course.

SPIT OR SWALL OW?  ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

NOT UR BUSINESS, he tapped back.

TEAGUE WILL WANT 2 KNOW

Corvo sent off a series of emojis that mainly involved the smiling pile of poo.

HOW DO U FEEL ABOUT THE WORD DILFISH ASKING 4 A FRIEND

Corvo considered blocking the number, but it would probably be a waste of his time. He began running again, hopping buildings via powerlines, getting closer by the minute. The moon faded into morning light, one day afoul its full girth, swollen, shaped by a loss it had yet to reclaim. The dawn was his, and the uniform of the high overseer seemed to him not quite red enough yet.

The wide grounds where hounds were kenneled and official Abbey vehicles parked were silent as death, and Corvo stalked across them just as quiet. He began climbing up to an open window high above, suddenly and painfully grateful for the climbing lessons that Jess had given him when he first started helping her with her work. 

The only thing Corvo could hear was the creak of his boots against the glossy marble of the empty hallways.

And then a door swung open and golden light cut across the darkness and a well-oiled voice said, “Come on in, Mr. Attano, what took you so long?”

His left hand curled and uncurled a fist, and he stepped into the light. The office was huge, open, red plush reading chairs, gilt-framed portraits of Abbey leaders, bookshelves to the ceiling, and stack after stack of the audiograph paper that Dunwall had used a century before. The man that sat behind the generous oak desk put down the little black book he had been skimming. Corvo met his eyes, the same blue he had seen a second before Teague Martin had shot Daud at the Rudshore Commerce Center.

“Your heretic hunt is a fairly weak cover for the bloody revenge of a jilted ex-lover,” Corvo rasped, holding the man’s eyes.

“Do you even have a cover, Attano?” Martin asked lightly.

“Where is my daughter?”

“We’ll get to that,” he made a dismissive motion with a gloved hand. “But first I want to know what you are going to do once Daud gets sick of tapping that-” Then Martin paused to scan Corvo head to toe. “- which will  _ probably _ be soon. You’re not his type.”

Corvo felt himself flush.

“We’re not- where is my daughter?”

Martin stood, and peered up at Corvo.

“She’s safe, in fact I would say if anything she’s bored. Our crayons are apparently not up to her standards. Happy? I have a theory, Attano, I think you’ll like it.” Martin pulled out a pack of cigarettes -Rothwild Reds- and offered one to Corvo. He shook his head. 

“Can we not do this?” He growled.

Martin sighed.

“I should have expected you not to play ball. But first, this theory of mine. Daud is a criminal mastermind. He’s the kind of man whose crime is his way of life- the air that he breathes, if you will. And for whatever voidforsaken reason-” here Martin spat, eyes suddenly violent, “-he’s fucking  _ you _ . A peacekeeper. A man of the law. The best protector in Serkonos, and a damn good one here in Dunwall. Until the death of Jessamine Kaldwin your hands were spotless, and even then I’m not sure you did it.”

Martin lit his cigarette with a single efficient click.

“Which tells me he doesn’t know what you are. Which  _ then _ tells me,” and here he stepped close to Corvo and met his gaze with glitter and ice, “That you are in love with Daud and he is not in love with you.”

Corvo’s heart was about to pound out of his chest and before he could stop himself he said, “I’m not- it’s- that’s rather reductive,” Which he instantly regretted, the tell could be seen from outer space. In the following flush of embarrassment he found himself reaching out and punching Martin in the face, freshly lit cigarette spinning off his lip, spittle spraying onto the floor, the silent gasp of a man trying to deny his pain.

Triumphant, bathing in the aborted gasp, Corvo stepped in to hit again, only to be flung to the floor by the wretched music that now made up his every nightmare, beating along his bones, boiling his skin, soundwave after soundwave writing agony along his limbs.

He fell. The sound was so close he could feel it in his teeth, his eyeballs, he would crack into a million pieces, he heard his own rough voice screaming and Martin was above him, a devil in red with a smug grin on his (depressingly attractive) face.

An organ grinder stood behind him.

Corvo felt like his teeth might crack for how hard he was clenching his jaw, pain a steady rhythm beating through his body. He saw Martin reach into the drawer of his desk and pull out a small knife, then he was being dragged outside, to the street, a soft rain falling dismal on his face. The next moment Martin was reaching into his mouth with a sure grip on his tongue and he was gagging, the next Martin was telling him something, gesturing at the organ and looking damned pleased about it.

What was it?

He focused.

“-device right here all along, you  _ complete _ idiot-”

And the next moment his tongue was being severed from his mouth and he couldn’t think, he couldn’t  _ think _ , and then there was silence.

He could feel pavement against one bruised hip, a simple pain he embraced in absence of the dizzying unreality of the music. He was drenched to the bone. He could hear crepuscular birds calling to each other, and he could taste blood gushing hot and thick from his mouth, spilling down his neck, so fast, so much. An overpowering pain, fresh and bright in the absence of that other pain. He felt the echoes of the music leaving his body. 

He hoped that Emily would be okay without him. 

He knew she was strong, but she was only a kid and he felt a kind of detached grief that he wouldn’t be there to protect her, to see her grow up. His blood joined the grimy rainwater sluicing between the cobblestones.

He felt relaxed, a vessel empty of the pain inflicted upon him and grateful to be nothing more than a hollow shell. He would be gone soon, he knew this. He felt faint. He felt euphoric. He let it all go, opened his hands from their tight grip on the world, felt rain patter softly onto his palms, and embraced the void.

As if from a great distance, he watched a figure in white stop in front of him on the street. She knelt, staining her white suit almost immediately with his blood. She frowned immaculate black brows, muttered a spell and cracked open a vial, and he felt the blood leaking from his mouth reverse its flow. As her fingers wove a second incantation his eyes focused briefly on the predawn sky and then rolled back into his head.

“What a gift you are,” She murmured. 

The next brief moments of consciousness had a hazy quality to them.

He saw the woman’s hands on his face, pouring something between his slack lips.

He saw The Outsider, biting back a laugh filled with more teeth than any person should have in his mouth, sharp, wet, wanting, irreverent. 

Captivated.

He saw a circle of glowing red light, a nine-sided star, arcane symbols and inscriptions and he was in the center of the written magicks.

The slow roll of wax down the candles at regular intervals around the circle.

Smoke curling sluggish from a blunt held lightly between the lips of the tall whaler who called him Trash Mouth. The woman in white stood behind her.

“If we need Daud crawling, we’ll collar him with Corvo. If we don’t- well. I’m curious to see where this one’s loyalties lie after this is all over,” the woman in white said.

The whaler watched him with sharp eyes, blew a thick fog over the dark room. The fog ate his world and then he was fog as well.

Static, like a television almost tuned and between the bands of hissing nothing a desertlike place he almost recognized. The salt spray of the sea, and then pure static snow.

And then it was early morning, clean dawn light warm on his face. He wasn’t bleeding out. He wasn’t in any pain at all, in fact, and when Corvo brought a hand up to his mouth he noticed that his knuckles had healed.

But his tongue was still gone.

He shuttered off that sensation. He’d deal with it later; even the idea of thinking about it at that moment made him panicky. Later. After he had found Emily.

Corvo frowned. His allotted time wasn’t up, and to be honest he would have expected The Outsider to make a big deal out of personally taking his tongue rather than puppeting the High Overseer to do it. As theatrical as it was to have the leader of his sworn enemy do it, it lacked the personal touch. It raised more questions than it answered.

At least now he knew what the Holger Device was. And where it was. And why The Outsider wanted it away from the Abbey. Corvo wondered, though, if The Outsider had thought this one through. Now that Martin knew how powerful the device was, he’d steal it back the minute he could. Would that void the contract he had made with Corvo?

Corvo snickered at the pun he’d made. It wouldn’t be good enough, would it, to put the thing back only for Martin to take it away immediately. To complete his mission, he also had to take down the High Overseer. It was fine with him but he did feel a bit irritated that The Outsider had so grossly undersold his task. And he hadn’t even bargained! What an absolute choffer.

Corvo looked to his left, across the white pillow on the cot. He was in a basement of some sort. The air was warm. He was sweating. The woman in white, his savior, was pouring a small vial of something into a mostly-full decanter of whisky. Two glasses were set next to it, a small vase of stunning little purple flowers, two cigars as well. He closed his eyes again and feigned sleep as she straightened the blankets over him and placed a small glass of water next to the cot.

A door creaked open, heavy boots crossed the room.

“It is done, Delilah. The Whalers have pledged loyalty to you and me and we’ll go after the Abbey. Taking our revenge has them united- it’s what Daud should have done anyway, instead of sending us out to look for some kid…” The voice of the Whaler trailed off.

“The fact that it was that easy tells me this was the right decision. Your men will survive this, with careful leadership and a singular purpose to guide them.”

“I suppose.”

A long silence. Shuffling of papers.

“I’m going to find Daud. I need to tell him it’s over.”

“Lurk I would rather you did not.”

“I owe him the honesty.”

“Seems to me like vestigial loyalty. Or is this another betrayal?”

“I wouldn’t-”

A small hiss. Corvo wanted to open his eyes but kept them lightly closed, his breathing regular. The room was so warm.

“Fine. But be back here tonight, love. I would celebrate with you,” Delilah’s voice sounded pleased now. Then the door creaked shut and Corvo was alone.

He moved silently, on feet that felt freshly capable of running marathons. The basement’s one window showed him a tidy alley and the morning sun. The smell of vegetation filtered gently in from whatever was upstairs. The air felt a fever on his skin. He gulped water from the utility sink in the room, then examined the small vial of liquid left below the sink. Poison. He hesitated for a moment. Then he poured out half the whisky and replaced it with water. The color didn’t change, but he was worried that if he poured out any more it would. Delilah wouldn’t drink from her cup- she would never know- and perhaps Lurk would be strong enough to survive it. He had, after all, seen her master take a bullet to the chest and recover with alarming speed.

He got back into bed and closed his eyes.

And then he waited.

He thought he would have to wait through the entire day and the idea filled him with dread, but at some point Delilah came back and fed him some liquid that pushed him gently back into overheated unconsciousness.


	11. Chapter 11

When Corvo awoke he was covered in a thin film of sweat and the room was dark. He waited a long while, but all was silent. Using his cell phone as a flashlight (no awkward texts from any unknown numbers this time) he explored the room. There was a small camera on a shelf. The most recent video on it showed the whaler, Lurk, whose life he had hopefully just saved. She was sprinting, during the attack on the Rudshore Commerce Center, and the camera seemed to get staticky around the edges of her form. Then she was pushing a knife up into the skull of a city watch detective. Corvo put the camera back. He tried the door. Locked.

He closed his eyes and recalled the feeling of sweeping the area for electronics. There. A cell phone, unregistered, filled with coded texts from blocked numbers, suspended six inches from the ground in an alley two blocks from here.

He looked at the window, but it was too small to fit through and besides, breaking the glass would bring attention he didn’t want. He squinted, found a powerline, and was gone, gasping in the cool air perched above the skyline.

Lurk’s body was sprawled across a puddle, her Whaler’s mask bunched around her neck, lips pale against her brown skin. Corvo felt for a pulse, breathed a sigh of relief, and hoisted her over a shoulder.

Now what?

He hadn’t thought this plan though, if it even was a plan. Home was out of the question. Rudshore was still gone. The Hound Pits seemed a stupid idea.

Then he laughed, or attempted it, but a strange strangled sound left his mouth instead. Horrified, he nearly dropped the Whaler’s body. In the panic of the moment he had actually forgotten that he had a stump of flesh in his mouth instead of a tongue. He tamped down on the swell of grief and fear that followed that realization. That was going to complicate things, wasn’t it?

 

 

Captain Curnow lived in a minimalist, modern townhouse with a well-kept garden in the postage-stamp lawn out front.

When he opened the door he wore a bathrobe and an expression of complete disbelief.

Corvo used his own considerable mass as well as the mass of the unconscious Whaler to force his way inside.

“Mr. Attano what in the world-” Geoff sputtered, setting his cup of coffee down on the counter and looking in horror at Lurk. Corvo set her in the easy chair by Curnow’s television, looked enviously at the coffee, then pulled out his phone.

PROTECT HER. IF SHE DOESN’T WAKE UP SOON TAKE 2 A HOSPITAL PLS

He held the phone out to Geoff.

“Why can’t you-”

Corvo made a frustrated noise. Then he opened his mouth and Geoff blanched.

“What _happened_?”

He looked at Curnow with desperate eyes, and for a second Geoff looked like he was going to shake his head, deny Corvo, send him and his burden away.

Then the Whaler groaned, sat up, and vomited all over Geoff Curnow’s floor and the issue had to be shelved.

“She-she’s the one that killed Detective Sullivan!” Geoff gasped as Corvo steadied the Whaler with a strong grip on her shoulder. He shrugged.

“Bastard had it coming,” the Whaler spat, shaking, leaning into Corvo. “Oh, fuck, it’s you, Trash Mouth.”

Corvo gave a strangled laugh and tapped out:

NO MORE TRASH MOUTH. THE ABBEY CLEANSED ME OF MY SIN-MAKER

And then he opened his mouth.

She blinked, slow and calm, and nodded. Corvo felt the deep rage in the back of his mind subside a bit by her response.

“It was Teague, wasn’t it? That snake.”

Corvo started typing again.

HE HAS MY KID. SURPRISED ME W MUSIC DEVICE. I HAVE TO FIND HER.

“Outsider’s Balls, Trash Mouth, you went to the Abbey? They know we know? This day could not get shittier,” she said.

Her skin looked ashen and Corvo realized what an effort she was making just to stay lucid. Abruptly, he got up and started rummaging through Curnow’s fridge. He found milk and poured her a glass. He felt a bit strange, suddenly stripped of the ability to be polite and communicate civilly, but the part of him that was a tense ball of anger and fear at Emily being gone and the Abbey so capable of hurting him in the most efficient manner possible was incredibly gleeful for the chance to inflict a bit of savagery on the hateful world around him. Captain Curnow stood frozen on the spot, watching the two of them.

In spite of it all he found himself rubbing the Whaler’s back as she downed the milk.

“So Delilah poisoned me once she had what she wanted.” Her voice was completely flat. Corvo nodded. She shrugged his hand away.

“And then you found me.”

Corvo nodded again. Later, he might explain that he had saved her, but he didn’t have the time. He had to find Emily.

WHERE IS DAUD

Lurk barked an ugly sort of laugh.

“Last I heard he was strategizing alone in his Safehouse. You must be an exceptional ah, _friend_ , Trash Mouth, because he’s working his ass off to find your kid. I’ll give you his address but Corvo-” her voice broke off, and she spent a long moment chewing her lip and frowning into the middle distance.

“-Tell him I don’t think he is weak. Tell him I regret ever speaking to Delilah Copperspoon. Tell him-” She took a deep breath, “-Tell him I am sorry.”

Corvo nodded, and reached out his hand. She shook it with a firm grip and then looked away.

“You should also tell him that his men need a leader right now. They’re scared and directionless. They would have accepted me, but I’m no good to them right now.”

Corvo’s heart gave a little pang. She probably would have been an exceptional warlord. He turned to Geoff and started typing again.

ABBEY IS CORRUPT. TRUST NO ONE. SORRY FOR INVOLVING U. I NEED TO FIND EMILY NOW.

Geoff frowned, then gave a sigh of defeat.

“Alright, Mr. Attano. But I am only doing this,” and here he gestured to the Whaler as well as Corvo, “because my niece speaks very highly of you and your Serkonan service record is so incredibly exceptional. Best of luck.”

Corvo took to the powerlines.

 

 

The wind picked up as he traveled, whipping strands of dark hair into his eyes and pushing him towards the ground far below. A storm was coming.

The address the Whaler texted him belonged to an oil refinery. Daud’s safehouse was high in its bones, all weathered bricks and faded safety paint chipped away by the years, perched on metal support beams. The sort of place with windows on all sides, open to the sun or the rain as it were, and Corvo was certain Daud saw him coming.

He felt like a rubber band on the verge of snapping.

WHERE IS EMILY?

He flung his phone into Daud’s face as he opened the door, dark-eyed and frayed around the edges. Then, when the mobster’s brow wrinkled in confusion, he grabbed the man’s hand and stuck his fingers into his mouth.

Daud pulled them out like he had been burned, and said in a voice low with rage and grief, “Teague?”

Corvo grunted, then wiggled his phone at Daud again.

“The Pendletons have her. Abbey supporters, upstanding nobles, she’s fine. It’s not far from here. The guard changes in three hours, we’ll go in then.”

WHY NOT NOW?

Daud spun the small laptop on one of the desks to face Corvo. Security footage of a group of eight or nine well-armed men and an Abbey overseer with the Holger Device, lounging in the hallway of a mansion.

“We’ll need the confusion. Trust me, Corvo. We have to do this right- we won’t get a second chance.”

So they waited.

 

 

Rain pattered on the metal roof, a loud artillery that made Corvo more tense than he had been, if that was even possible.

Daud lit a cigarette and checked the ammo on his weapons for the third time.

Corvo paced.

Daud lit a cigarette off the previous one.

The room felt small, strange, like they were the only people left in the entire world and these four walls were the entirety of that world.

The rain somehow got louder.

Corvo paced.

Daud lit another cigarette off the previous one.

Ten whole minutes had gone by. Corvo felt he might scream.

He tapped away at his phone for a minute, deleting and rewriting until finally he held his phone out to Daud.

WHAT DID YOU WANT TO TELL ME? THAT NIGHT?

Daud took a long drag from his current cigarette.

“...I was the one who hired Jess on that Holger Device job. I was an idiot for listening to Teague, it all spiraled out of control from that one mistake.” He bit the words out and wouldn’t look Corvo in the eye.

“I didn’t know why he wanted it, or what it did. I was a fool.”

The minutes crawled by and wind battered the windows of the tower in a mindless staccato. Corvo watched Daud as if from a great distance, while the man turned his back and leaned over the desk to pore over a floorplan of some sort.

Corvo looked at the worn texture of Daud’s leather gloves. Stepped closer, watched the quick deliberate movements he made as he shuffled the papers to a new configuration.

Corvo looked at him like a puzzle, a new answer to the grief and confusion lodged in his heart, a response to the things in himself he could only satisfy with violence. No matter how much he wished for graceful acceptance for everything miserable and wrong in his life, there was a part of him that seemed to be always screaming (Jess, prison, now Emily, now his missing tongue, now the lies of omission fed to him) and in front of him was a man whose life and trade was built on violence and brutality. And he wasn’t responsible for Corvo’s misery, not really, but he thought he was.

His desk was covered in plans to rescue Corvo’s daughter and he wouldn’t turn around and the minutes dragged on.

Now he was tapping ash into an overflowing ashtray, now jotting down some note on the map in front of him. He still smelled incredible. Corvo wished he could have hated him. It would have made everything easy. He was a bad guy, plain and simple. He had lied to Corvo, been shitty and dishonest with his feelings, barely even _managed_ his feelings, tried to get Corvo to play punisher, withheld information to keep him close, beat an old man to within an inch of his life, and-

-acted decisively, followed no one’s authority but his own, -kissed him to get a cigarette,

-kissed him with a paper-thin excuse to hide behind, -wanted to hide,

-was here with a plan to rescue Corvo’s child, ignoring his entire gang, putting his life on the line, taking on entirely too much blame for a mistake anyone might have made, checking his weapons for the fourth time and he had lost track of how many cigarettes, the man was frantic, he needed atonement for sins he hadn’t even really committed and completely ignored the sins he should have felt awful about, this fucking idiot of a man and his stupidly sharp eyes and the way he smelled and the tense, purposeful lines of his body.

Corvo found he was clenching and unclenching his left hand. He was torn between beating Daud to a bloody pulp and bending him over the desk that very minute.

And if Daud was such a bad guy, was Corvo really such a hero?

Daud stopped moving, but did not turn around, not when Corvo had peeled off his dress shirt, nor when he had unbuckled his belt and flung it away, not even with Corvo’s hands tracing a rich conflict of textures- thin warm lips, harsh wire stubble, the smooth column of tendons along his throat, a soft undershirt worn so thin Corvo could feel the nubs of nipples through the weave.

He didn’t turn around with Corvo’s teeth rasping across the back of his neck, hands underneath his shirt, traveling along the scars and curves and bone edges. Corvo felt the invitation there, in the unyielding body he pushed against, that Daud would speak that language of violence with him, knew it as well as he knew breathing, could and would listen to hours of Corvo speaking in blows of grief and rage, would be as an embassy to him and normalize it, validate it, speak it back and initiate Corvo into the tribe with feral joy.

“Go on, Corvo,” Daud murmured, still bowed over the desk of plans and maps and blueprints, so Corvo manhandled him onto the narrow bed in the corner, pushed him into the mattress with one hand firm on his throat and the other firm on his dick through his pants. Daud twitched with aborted motion as Corvo continued to pin him to the bed with a hand slotted over his windpipe, thumb kept against his carotid.

The brief involuntary noise he made, as Corvo choked him with no resistance, was awful.

There was something of relief on his face though, and he struggled to take off his pants while Corvo held him there and watched his face grow red. Daud’s cock was noticeably interested in what was going on, which made Corvo smile with all his teeth.

Corvo finally released Daud’s throat to shuck off his own clothing.

“I like you better now that you can’t talk garbage,” Daud wheezed, the lie both combative and terribly tragic, then he leaned up to nip at Corvo’s lips, harsh, painful. Corvo let him worry at his mouth, barely reacting, until Daud’s tongue shoved in and flicked against the stump where his tongue should have been. It felt disgusting, and Corvo shuddered, coming alive at the sudden wave of fury that coursed through his body, rocking his hips down against Daud and finding delicious friction and the shocking heat of Daud’s dick heavy against his belly.

Daud’s hands clawed their way into Corvo’s hair, Corvo’s teeth sank into the meat of Daud’s shoulder, Corvo snarled and Daud sighed, obliging, stretching a hand down to pull at Corvo’s cock.

Corvo realized that he had a real problem.

Well, two real problems.

The first was that he had very little blood with which to think, he was dizzy with arousal and a kind of howling animal rage that pooled like liquid fire in his belly.

The second was that while all he wanted was to bury himself in the blood hot body underneath him and pound his fury into Daud until he couldn’t think of anything at all, the goody-two-shoes in the back of Corvo’s mind also really needed to tell Daud that he had never done this and shouldn’t they talk about it first, before he fucked him stupid in this current mental state of tension, rage, and want?

Daud’s hand, slowly and surely jacking him off, was not helping.

With the most pathetic little sound he had ever made in his life, Corvo rolled to the side and fumbled for his phone. He struggled to focus on typing while Daud continued to tease at the hard length of his dick, insistent, obnoxious.

SUIT I WANT TO FUCK YOU BUT I HAVE NEVER DONE THIS

Corvo watched Daud flush bright red, leaving the scar that ran down the side of his face shockingly white. The blush seemed somehow raunchy on the face of a hardened gangster and it made his stomach flip-flop.

DO YOU NOT BOTTOM OR

But Daud didn’t read this second line because he was rummaging under the bed, then shoving lube and a condom into Corvo’s hand, bringing his lips filthy and close to mutter in Corvo’s ear, “You want me to talk you through it?”

Corvo tossed his phone over his shoulder, then nodded with a crooked grin.

“Then give me your fingers, Muscle, and let’s see if you’re any good without that mouth of yours.”

It seemed like hardly any time at all passed, then, while Corvo floated on a hazy cloud of lust watching Daud’s flushed face as he finger-fucked the man into deeper shades of crimson, slick knuckles sliding into him with minimal resistance, enjoying the way he just barely held back a whine when Corvo added a third finger.

“Fuck,” Daud observed.

Corvo grinned like a shark. He was a bit smitten with the way Daud had tensed up and rattled off a blue streak of Serkonan curses when Corvo had crooked his fingers and pressed just so.

He liked making this man come undone. It felt, and with Daud this was not the first time Corvo had noticed this feeling, like sublimation. Every bit-off moan Daud made eased a howl of anger lodged in Corvo’s now useless throat.

He grazed that spot again with teeth worrying Daud’s earlobe, and was rewarded with an arched back, hands digging like claws into his arms, his mother and his heritage receiving no end of harsh criticism and unfair accusations from Daud.

“Enough, Muscle, just fuck me already,” Daud said, but his cock was stiff and leaking so Corvo shrugged and kept going, keeping an excessively slow rhythm. Daud whined then, a frustrated mess, hips coming up to take Corvo’s fingers. Corvo was delighted. He pressed a chaste kiss to Daud’s forehead and finally went to go find the condom. Daud’s breath caught when Corvo’s fingers withdrew.

“Fuck you, Attano,” He complained, and Corvo flicked one of Daud’s nipples and nodded, yes, fantastic, what a great idea.

“We’re gonna have to learn sign language, huh,” Daud said.

Corvo felt something like the tip of a knife in his heart at the implications there. The affection that flooded every nerve ending of his body took him by surprise.

He pushed into Daud with one fluid slide, biting his lip at how damn tight he was, he didn’t want to _compare_ , but- and then Daud was yelping, “Fucking fuck, Corvo, that was the straightest thing you have ever- fuck, give me a minute-”

Corvo froze. He watched Daud take shaky shallow breaths.

“You’re too big for that bullshit, Outsider’s balls do I look like a porn star? Don’t answer that.”

Corvo managed to kiss apologetic little circles around Daud’s neck, but he was quivering from the effort of keeping still and not dying an (admittedly wonderful) swift death by way of his dick exploding.

“Okay, you can…”

Corvo continued to hold completely still. He was quickly realizing that his favorite thing in the entire world was a needy, impatient Daud beneath him.

“No, really,” Daud admonished.

Corvo felt his own pulse in every inch of his being, head to toe, but mostly in the bit of him that was deep inside Daud, and he waited.

“Corvo, fuck, just-- !” And then Daud began moving instead, expression desperate and irritated, hips rocking up in tiny little beats, angling until his ankles clenched their bones against the small of Corvo’s back and only then did Corvo let himself move.

For a second he thought he would come right on the spot, from the way Daud tipped his head back and hissed, the way he felt hot and slick, clenched around him. The frantic tension deep in his bones came roaring back. Corvo’s hands found grips along Daud’s sides as he slammed into him like inevitability, like a hunger, like a force of nature, like desperation. Daud’s voice hitched mid-growl when Corvo found a particularly good angle.

Corvo buried his face in Daud’s neck, fucking him with every fiber of his being electric and pulsating, feeling Daud groaning acceptance, fingernails digging bloody furrows down his back, thighs high around his waist, tension rising like in a hot swell through Corvo’s body. It left him dizzy and frantic.

He put a trembling hand on Daud’s cock, some small part of his mind proud for even remembering it existed in the dizzying prescience of his own finish. Daud growled his approval as Corvo fisted his cock in a vague counterpoint to the movement of his hips. Daud’s teeth bared like a threat. Corvo heard a warning squeak of overburdened springs from the bed as he thrust into him, but Daud gasped out a demand for more. So Corvo grabbed desperately at any shred of restraint he had left and pounded him into the bed, staving off orgasm for as long as he humanly could, until Daud was slick with sweat and his muscles were trembling and the insults spewing from the mobster’s mouth were more nonsense than actual words. And then Corvo was coming, all choking sobs around the space where his tongue should have been, hand clinging to Daud’s cock and lips quivering as he emptied into the sturdy body beneath him.

Daud moved his hand off as Corvo came, and within a few moments followed after, sudden heat and thick liquid adding to the slick of sweat between their bodies.

For a long minute neither of them moved. Then Daud laughed with a newly roughened voice and canted his hips to the side to scoot out from under Corvo.

“That was okay, I guess, for a first-timer,” he said with undisguised satisfaction thick in his voice, wobbling like a colt. Corvo shot a hand out, grabbed him by the wrist, and looked at him with as much desperation as he felt he could live with showing on his face.

Daud paused.

“You’re joking.”

Corvo shook his head and didn’t let go of Daud’s wrist. He was still feeling aftershocks of orgasm course through his body and Daud still smelled like the best drug he had ever tried. The mafioso groaned.

“Fine. But only for a minute.”

Then he lay back down on the tiny bed and Corvo dragged him closer, throwing a heavy arm across Daud’s sweaty, hairy chest and nuzzling into the crook of his neck.

He felt extremely content.

“Corvo, I swear by the Outsider....” but then Daud trailed off, and ran a hand through the salt-stuck hair on Corvo’s brow. Corvo pressed his lips softly to Daud’s, could feel both of their pulses still racing, and smiled.

“O-o-o-kay, shower,” Daud said stiffly and stood. Corvo was pretty certain an entire minute had not yet passed. Something he would have to work on, apparently. He watched Daud walk over to the tower’s bathroom, suddenly worried, what if he had overdone it and hurt him? He forced himself to relax. The man had survived a gunshot wound to the chest.

He felt grounded in a way he hadn’t in far too long. The rain still drummed around him, but instead of making him tense he felt soothed by its steady background noise, comforted by nature and time and the predictability of the universe in this moment.

Daud’s cellphone began ringing, but there was no way Daud would hear it over the shower and the rain. Corvo fished through Daud’s clothing and retrieved it.

“Daud? You have to come get the kid right now, there’s no time!” Billie sounded frantic. Corvo put the phone on speaker and then texted Billie, frantic, his heart suddenly going off the rails, suddenly nauseous with worry.

BILLE DONT HANG UP ON DAUD TELL ME WHAT TO DO

“Corvo- oh, right, okay, come now, we have like five minutes, they’re taking her away again, the plans have changed and Martin is up to something.”

I WILL B THERE

“Good, okay, come quick, we have no time!”

Corvo dressed, heart still racing, stole a handgun from the desk, and hopped back onto the powerlines before he even thought about waiting for Daud.

No. He couldn’t risk waiting, and he figured Daud would catch on soon enough. He texted as he flew, telling Daud about the change and asking him to come as soon as he could. Corvo hoped they wouldn’t need an ace in the hole but he somehow felt better, knowing that Daud and the rest of his arsenal wouldn’t be far behind.

 

 

Billie waited for him one building away from the Pendleton’s mansion, peering out from under the eaves. She still didn’t look completely well, but she wasn’t quite as near death’s door as she had been back at Curnow’s place.

“Martin showed up ten minutes ago, they have a car out front, this is our shot.”

WEREN’T YOU DEALING W THE WHALERS? HOW R YOU HERE? Corvo typed.

“I already did that. I have three squads on the watch, four securing checkpoints for us in the nearby neighborhoods, and some of our elites are tailing Delilah. So then I came here, especially since Daud wasn’t answering his phone earlier.” She drawled the last part, looking Corvo up and down with an expression that was both accusatory and smug. Corvo thought that, given her recent behavior, this was some serious ‘glass house homeowner throwing stones’ bullshit, but he decided not to go down that path.

YOU’RE A HELL OF A LEADER.

“I know,” Billie said softly. Sadly, even.

PLAN?

“I take point. I’m faster, I’ve fought Abbey fuckers before, and your girl doesn’t know me. You back me and split the minute you get her. I’ll draw their fire.”

Corvo nodded, and the two of them turned towards the rooftop when all of the sudden a small soggy figure in a white hoodie jumped down off the roof and under the eaves.

“Corvo!” Emily whispered, ecstatic and drenched, and clung to him. Corvo’s jaw dropped, and Billie had a similarly stupefied expression on her face.

“How?” Billie asked, incredulous.

Emily peeked out at the Whaler from under Corvo’s arm. “They looked away for a minute, so I ran, and then they argued about shooting guns at me, so I climbed up and went through a small space so they couldn’t follow me and then I heard you talking about Corvo’s friend Daud so I came here.”

Billie blinked. Corvo couldn’t stop a smile taking over his face. He didn’t let go of Emily.

“Good thinking, kid,” Billie said.

The rain ran in sheets in the open air, and night was falling. Corvo realized that he had to finish this, he had to do this now. He might not get another opportunity, and Emily was safe, and he was -he was-

 _Irredeemable_ , a voice whispered. Head over heels for a monstrous criminal with the emotional intelligence of a hagfish, no job, no tongue, no justice, and if he didn’t get that fucking device now he might never get a shot at fixing any of those things.

 _You can’t fix_ people _what is wrong with you_ , the voice insisted, but Corvo thought instead of Daud throwing away his gang to save his daughter, of Daud opening up to him at the Hound Pits, attempting to snuggle even though he clearly hated it, and he thought that maybe that was okay. Maybe Daud could redeem himself. He just wanted to be there for when that happened.

He had to try for Emily, at the very least. The voice of self-doubt and criticism inside him could not fault him that.

He hunched over his phone.

EMILY+BILLIE GTFO. I GO FOR MARTIN. I’M GETTING THAT DEVICE. BILLE GET EMILY TO SAFETY. EMILY, I LOVE YOU. I AM PROUD OF YOU.

Emily was confused, but Billie nodded, and held out her hand for Emily to take it.

“Come on kid. You’re almost in the safe zone, let’s do this. Do you like spicy chips? We also have dry clothing. Let’s scoot, and your dad will take care of this.”

Emily nodded, worry flashing over her face for a second. Then she put on a brave face and took Billie’s hand.

“Okay, let’s go.” Billie closed her eyes and then the both of them disappeared.

Corvo stood there for a heartbeat, feeling completely alone. Then he found a powerline next to the Pendleton mansion’s third floor and flickered into that space.

 

 

And it felt almost too easy. Corvo dropped behind the man with the device strapped to his chest, and choked him out almost before the other overseers with their creepy golden masks could turn around. The rest of them were down on the ground, unconscious or dead he wasn’t sure, within a couple of minutes, and then Corvo was back on the powerlines with the heavy ancient device strapped to his chest. He had almost stolen a mask too, but decided that the practical joke his heart desired would probably end up with him dead so he had better not.

It was night and the rain had slowed to a monotonous drizzle.

The museum wasn’t far, but Corvo was fairly certain he was right- if Martin stole the device back, the black-eyed bastard would lord it over him and he would be his vassal once more.

He had an idea.


	12. Chapter 12

Corvo tapped out a long series of texts to Geoff Curnow. He carefully omitted the whalers from the conversation, aside from thanking him for saving Billie’s life. That wasn’t the point, and hopefully Geoff’s heart would be in the right place and he would save all the organized crime stuff for after it was over, when the Abbey’s corruption had been stamped out and Curnow had been awarded medals, promotions, his own squad, whatever the hell it was that watch officers wanted in Dunwall.

Corvo reminded Curnow of the corrupt High Overseer Campbell, dethroned by Martin less than a year ago now, a lecherous old bag with a penchant for barely-legal girls and heavy drinking. His gaze _wandered_ , and while that bout of corruption had been stopped by internal investigations, Corvo alleged that the previous snake had simply been eaten by a much larger and more venomous one when Martin came to power.

There was a seemingly infinite 15 minute pause before Curnow replied. Corvo tried to think of backup plans while he waited, but every last one of them involved his hands stained with blood and the bodies of too many men on the ground around him. He needed this watch officer to be honorable, for this to work, for his own hands to stay (relatively) clean.

When Curnow finally did respond, he asked for proof. Corvo grinned at his phone.

He told Curnow to show up at the museum connected to the academy of natural philosophy, he told him about the crime, he told him who would be there to attempt to commit it again, and he told him about the tortures done to him without jury, without sentence, without law.

He almost offered up his own missing tongue as evidence, then thought better of it. This wasn’t, actually, about him.

Curnow sent a simple reply: YOU OWE ME ONE

 

 

Billie undid the electronic lock at the new safehouse’s gate quickly, easily. The kid at her side seemed more excited than scared, and Billie was relieved. Crying children were not her specialty, but Emily seemed calm and alert and ready for anything.

Thomas was there, and within a few moments the two of them were trading instagram handles and arguing about cartoon characters. Billie felt like an alien, a little bit, but was glad the kid was occupied. She went to check on her squads, trying not to think too hard about the one she had sent after Delilah.

She knew she should be mad. But all she really felt was hollow. Delilah had turned her against Daud, and then immediately stabbed her in the back to guarantee that the Whalers fall into complete chaos. But really- what Delilah had done to her was exactly what she had done to Daud. It was all horrid, sure, but perhaps whatever line Delilah drew between personal life and her business meant that the things they had done, the things she had said, still meant something. That’s how it was for her and Daud, and if Billie was honest with herself, she knew that trust was barely a word in her vocabulary. It didn’t really affect the rest of her feelings. And she wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

To be quite honest, if there was anything concrete Billie felt at that moment, it was disappointment, deep in her bones, lying like sludge at the core of her being. Disappointment in herself, maybe, but more than that, that the world had shown her its face and that face was a monster’s face, grotesque and petty and doomed.

She pushed it all aside. There were decisions to be made and operations to coordinate and in the background Thomas was telling Emily about the ghost on Bitterleaf and Billie decided to wait and think about this terrifying philosophical shortcoming she had later. Much later. Maybe never.

 

 

Slackjaw laughed when he understood Corvo’s intent, the deep belly laugh that Corvo had enjoyed so much on their one, short-lived date not too long ago. He flashed hand signals and his Bottle Street Boys took up positions around the perimeter of the Academy of Natural Philosophy’s museum.

“Corvo your timing could not be better, with the High Overseer proclaiming corruption his new enemy, never mind The Outsider,” he grinned, eyes darting down to Corvo’s left hand.

IT IS PRETTY GOOD.

“My boys, well, they’re not _so_ religious. But they’ll feel some satisfaction with their knives in the chests of false preachers. They’ll tell their friends. And the Bottle Street Boys, well. We’ll pass into legend.”

MAKE SURE THEY WAIT THO. THIS COULD GO EASY.

Slackjaw shrugged. He had that fancy revolver out again, twirling it mindlessly as he peered out into the dark, rainy night and dreamed a triumphant future.

Corvo saw them first, gold masks glinting where raindrops slid off in small sudden twinkles. Teague Martin stalked out from behind the five or six of them standing there in their dark garb. Corvo smiled. No Holger Device to hobble him in this fight. He didn’t want to admit how thirsty he was for the high overseer’s blood, but he did start up an internal litany begging him to _just fucking try something_ right there and then.

A long moment passed, the masked Abbey agents sizing up the Bottle Street Boys lining the walkway up to the museum, calling insults and spinning their unlit molotov cocktails in a theatrical fashion.

Corvo had eyes only for the high overseer, who was about to give some kind of order to a subordinate when, behind him, Geoff Curnow and a squad of city watch officers stepped out of the night. Martin drew up, tense, and the two of them spoke, Curnow becoming more and more agitated.

Corvo grinned. Curnow had handcuffs out now, and was reciting citizen’s rights as he cuffed Martin. The Abbey agents fidgeted, then one by one gave up their weapons and were taken in by the watch. The group left. Quietly.

Curnow strode up the marble steps to where Slackjaw and Corvo stood.

“I just wanted to inform you that you are in violation of Dunwall code right now- no citizen can loiter on property after an institution’s closing hours. Please clear the area.”

Corvo had a sudden spark of brilliance. He got out his phone and then showed it to Slackjaw.

ON THE DL- THE OFFICER IS A FAN OF TALL MEN ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE LAW.

“That so?” Slackjaw said, mouth slanting into a smile. He shot his gang a few more hand signals, and the Bottle Street Boys melted into the dark, nattering to each other about which bars they would hit now they their night’s plans were cancelled.

“Officer?” Slackjaw called, taking long strides to catch up to the man. “This may be a bit forward, but I can’t help but wonder- what time you be getting off shift? And can Slackjaw perhaps take you out for a drink then?”

Curnow stiffened. But none of his men were around.

“It’s going to be nine AM, you sure about this?”

“A good conversation’s worth waiting for.”

“What makes you so sure it’ll be a good one?”

“Oh, Slackjaw’s just got that feeling.”

“Well…”

“You won’t regret it.”

Corvo watched them leave, Slackjaw bent close to Curnow’s ear, Curnow fussing with the zipper on his rain jacket.

 _He_ was staying until dawn. The device needed to make it until morning, when the academy came to life and someone would discover it back in its exhibit, and then do something -anything- clever and probably bureaucratic with it to make sure it didn’t get stolen again.

Daud would probably show up any minute now, also.

He yawned. The static on the edges of his vision was getting louder, and then The Outsider was there, perched on the commemorative statue of Dunwall’s last empress from a century before.

“So the real question is, did I win or lose here?” Asked The Outsider.

Corvo shrugged. He had done the task required of him.

“I mean, okay, the Holger Device is locked up in academia again, but your tongue is missing anyway. I’m not thrilled.”

The Outsider frowned, then static swallowed the world, and he was standing in front of Corvo.

“I suppose the best part about this is that Jessamine’s true killers will get justice done by the same system that put you in prison for six months. The same system you spent your life (so far) upholding. I wonder how that will feel for you?”

Black eyes appraised him.

“The obvious thing to do would be to return your tongue to you. Fuck The Abbey, am I right?”

Corvo held his breath.

“So I propose another trade! I guess I could reference Faust again, but really, you’re just my bitch now. No point in pretending,” The Outsider shrugged thin shoulders. “But I don’t know that you mind either, Corvo. You’re a walking bundle of wasted potential. You _need_ me.”

Corvo snorted.

“So what do you say? I make sure you don’t fucking squander the abilities you have, and you get a tongue back? I think Daud would definitely be in favor of the deal.” The Outsider flashed a shit-eating grin.

Ah.

Daud.

Corvo hadn’t actually decided on it, but, there was a large part of him that longed for a return to the status quo. The thing where he was a bodyguard for the rich and political, where he knew what right and wrong were by knowing what the law was, where he just had to worry about Emily.

Daud complicated things.

Did he make Corvo happy? He didn’t know. He made him feel more than he had in far too long. Irritation, impatience, affection, a desperate sort of yearning, lust for violence, hell, even plain lust. Daud pushed him off his moral center, constantly, left him unbalanced without even knowing he did it.

Comparing Daud to Jessamine was a shitty thing to do and yet Corvo did it constantly (well, the minute he had realized he had a thing for Daud, only a little over 48 hours ago, though it felt like ages) and he hated that he did. Was this healthy? Would Daud be good for him? By the numbers, no, absolutely not. But in his heart Corvo wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure he knew what good was, any more.

He had sort of assumed that The Outsider would not return his tongue to him, and he had decided to take Emily back to Karnaca, get a job there, hope school worked out better for her, start over, be good, be lawful, focus on the things that mattered most to him. Walk away from Daud, from the Whalers, from Dunwall and its shitty weather and shittier legal system.

Be a new person, be a diminished person, a man from whom too much had been taken for him to find the energy to struggle any longer. Care for Emily and start again. Keep it all very simple. Very neat.

But if he had his tongue back? If he could have all of whatever _this_ was back? Did it change things so much?

He stared into the cloudy predawn sky. He wasn’t sure he knew what to do with the part of himself that longed for violence, for self-determined rights and wrongs, for justice via one man’s will imposed upon everyone else’s, for making people do what he wanted through fear and intimidation.

He thought of Thomas, quiet and kind to strangers. He thought of Billie. Delilah. She wasn’t gone, and Billie wasn’t necessarily forgiven. He thought of Daud sleeping at his feet, grinding his teeth and refusing to give any real indication that he wanted Corvo. Of The Heart app, Jess’s voice whispering strange truths through the wires, the arcane bone charms that seemed to shift the balances of reality all around him. The way Daud had snarled like a wild animal and clenched around him.

Did he _really_ want the status quo? A reality where his losses did nothing but force new challenges on him for every sad day he was left alive on this planet? Or a reality where his losses somehow were transubstantiated into otherworldly power, where the people he trusted most were hardened criminals and heretics?

The sun was coming up now, bird chirping, new light peeking through dark rain clouds, a light wind whipping at the academy’s flags all around the courtyard.

Corvo held out his hand for The Outsider to shake.

The black-eyed deity grinned, then, flashing too many teeth and a level of unhealthy excitement that definitely meant strange things in Corvo’s future.

He guessed he’d welcome it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutout for reasonablywittyatbest for beta-ing this thing!!! Without her I don't think I actually would have posted it. And thanks for reading my first attempt at writing prose in about ten years ahahaha oh my god. Thanks for putting up with the clunky writing and the nigh-endless list of tropes and jokes I thought were funny that make up the 'plot' of this thing. Thank you. I hope it entertained.


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